028 - Posture as Doorway

As we transition from exploring gesture to posture, we are shifting from the realm of phasic muscles to the realm of postural muscles.

This is an over-simplification, and not exact, but you can think about gesture as happening in the limbs, and posture as happening in the core. When we look at gesture, we are often looking at movements in the arms and hands, the feet and legs. When we look at posture, we are looking at the core stability and organization of movement, as it relates to sitting and standing, walking and turning.

Postural muscles include the deep muscles in your abdomen, pelvis, and back. These are the muscles that hold you upright when you’re sitting. These are the muscles people are talking about when they complement your posture, or admonish you not to slouch. All of them are centrally located along the midline of the body, and connect to your spinal column.

Structurally, your spinal column scaffolds the entire body. At the north end is the juncture with your head, the cranium, which is very heavy. The skeletal and muscular organization required to balance your head effortlessly on top of your neck is rather formidable. At the southern, or sacral, end of the spine it unites with the pelvic girdle, to scaffold the structure of your legs. And at a line essentially lateral to the heart, it ties in to the organization of the rib cage, to scaffold the arms. This bodily organization is so successful that it has given rise to the entire phylogenetic class of vertebrates. Vertebrates include mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. All of us share this common organization. All vertebrates, have a backbone, a skull, an endoskeleton, bilateral symmetry, and two pairs of appendages. These blueprints work.