PMR #298: How your eyes, breath, and mood impact your your posture, performance, and body mechanics, with Posturepro founder Annette Verpillot

Our guest on the show today is Annette Verpillot, Canadian posturologist and founder of Posturepro. Annette is here to blow our minds about the causes of bad posture and give us some simple ways to address them. Posture has been defined as the maintenance of correct tension between flexors and extensors against the pull of gravity. Her perspective on how this balance is maintained looks a lot further than sitting upright though. According to Annette, the brain is actually the main cause of poor posture. It often finds itself processing a faulty sensory input and then responding by misdirecting the muscles. From the moment we are born, there might be imbalances in how we crawl or position our tongues. These issues go on to generate painful knock-on effects that most people live their whole lives with. Even our eyes or the way we sleep could cause improper movements that have posture-related effects. Luckily, many of these problems are reversible though. We get into all of this and more with Annette today in what proves to be a highly information-packed episode. Make sure you grab a pen before tuning in.

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 Our conversation has been generously sponsored by the 4th Annual Metabolic Health Summit that is taking place from January 30th to February 2nd in LA. If you’d like to go, you can get tickets on metabolichealthsummit.com. You can also get 20% off general admission tickets by using the code ‘PaleoMagMHS’. Enjoy!

 

Key Points From This Episode:

Understanding posture as a bodily ‘global awareness’ and the body’s response to gravity. A description of optimal posture and how to know when it has not been achieved. How to use signals given by pain, bodily planar views, and clothing to diagnose bad posture. Whether athletes or sedentary folks experience pain from posture more acutely. Annette’s ideas about the brain being the first cause of poor posture. Links between DNA-based movement patterns and many bodily systems. How the brain, posture, and biomechanics are connected. Causes for bad posture in young children such as crawling wrong or walking too early. The centrality of the tongue in causing teeth, speech, and posture problems. Correct tongue posture and how to maintain it as an adult using red dots and a gum guard. Connections between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, posture, and calmness. How eye health, and specifically focus-related issues, can affect perception and posture. Eye exercises for rectifying diverging or hypo-converging eyes. The error in perceiving the body as segmented in light of the centrality of the brain. A promising realization that many bodily ailments taken as incurable can actually be cured. Details about Annette’s consultation process involving few visits and simple exercises. The role feet play in posture, and tools Annette uses to cure flat feet such as insoles. Effects of jaw clenching and poorly tracking eyes on the body during REM sleep. Tips from Annette for pain sufferers: do her TED Talk eye exercises and stimulate your feet.

 

Tweetables:

“The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons defines posture as being the right amount of tension between flexors and extensors, which basically allows us as human to be able to stand upright and be able to fight gravity efficiently.” — @posture_pro [0:06:44.3]

“A brain imbalance leads to a postural imbalance. A postural imbalance creates a muscular imbalance, and this in turn creates biomechanical constraints. You cannot have this problem without having in conjunction a digestive, or even immune system problem.” — @posture_pro [0:20:31.1]

“We live in an era where we've cut the body into different parts and then we've created professions to address these specific pieces. We've neglected the fact that the body is a whole.” — @posture_pro [0:38:56.5]

 

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Annette Verpillot — https://posturepro.co/annette-verpillot/

Annette Verpillot on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-hT-eOK3Dfk2g08o2O_xxQ

Annette’s TED Talk — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3qdSo8z0Is

Posture Pro on Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/Posturepro/

Posture Pro on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/posturepro/?hl=en

Metabolic Health Summit — https://metabolichealthsummit.com/

JP Sears — https://awakenwithjp.com/

Dom D’Agostino — https://www.ketonutrition.org/

Robb Wolf — https://robbwolf.com/

Ryan Lowry — http://ryanlowry.org/

Zach Bitter — https://zachbitter.com/

Charles Poliquin — https://www.poliquingroup.com/

American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons — https://www.aaos.org/Default.aspx?ssopc=1

Marie Jean Pierre Flourens — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2117745/

Our conversation has been generously sponsored by the 4th Annual Metabolic Health Summit that is taking place from January 30th to February 2nd in LA. If you’d like to go, you can get tickets on metabolichealthsummit.com. You can also get 20% off general admission tickets by using the code ‘PaleoMagMHS’.

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