the inside story
As you sit with slumped posture, which
commonly happens along with slouching
your shoulders and UCS, you don’t typically
use your butt muscles (gluteus maximus,
gluteus medius) or abdominal core
muscles, so they weaken and offer little
support for your back. One of the hip
flexors (rectus femoris) is a quadriceps
muscle that runs across the hip and the
knee and can put uneven pressure on the
kneecap when tight. This uneven pressure
means that cartilage of the knee rubs
against cartilage of the thigh bone (femur),
which may lead to cartilage inflammation
and front knee pain (anterior knee pain).
We label this zone 1 of LCS.
Lower down the body, there is a second
region (zone 2 of LCS) that is commonlyassociated with slouching and slumping in
a chair. If you relax your legs forward and
only have a slight bend in your knees with
heels touching the floor and toes off the
ground yet pointed down, you may tighten
up your calf muscles (gastrocnemius, soleus)
and thigh muscles (biceps femoris of the
hamstring, adductor muscles of the inner
thigh) and stretch muscles along your shins
(tibialis anterior, tibialis posterior). This
may then put added stress on bands of tissue
in the heel called plantar fascia and lead to
piercing pain in your heel (plantar fasciitis).
Use the four therapeutic poses on
page 79 to help lengthen the muscles
that tend to be overactive or tight while
also strengthening the muscles that tend
to be underactive or weak in LCS.WEAK
WEAK
TIGHT
TIGHT
WEAK
TIGHT
TIGHT
TIGHT
WEAK
WEAK
TIGHT
4
4
3
3
3
1
1
1
2
2
2
TIGHT
77
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