How many times do you ask your child to lift his head up, or to sit up straight?
Those words are commonly said to individuals with Cerebral Palsy. Their parents, their teachers, their therapists, the team around them is constantly reminding them how they should be sitting and how they should correct their posture.
In WeFlow we believe that if they could do it, they would do it, without anybody asking for it.
We need to understand that postural control should be effortless. The mechanisms that we use to hold ourselves up and to adjust our posture are controlled below our conscious level, which means that they occur automatically. We don't need to think about holding our head up, we just hold it. It is the way our body is built, the efficiency of our fascial system, and the correct architecture of our body that allows us to maintain our posture using the least amount of muscle activity.
Let's think about this for a minute. How many hours per day are we sitting or standing, holding our head up? Probably many hours, in fact, most of the time we are awake. Do our neck muscles fatigue to the point that we drop our head? Usually not. We rely on our fascial system to hold our posture. The muscles are used to adjust it, to initiate movement and to move. But not to hold it.
Now, here is a simple test we can do to understand what happens when we are using the muscles to hold ourselves up:
Lay down on your bed, on your tummy, and bring the head off the bed keeping it parallel to the floor. Hold your head up! keep holding it! Don't drop it!
For how long will you last there? Not too long. Why? here you are depending on your posterior neck and back muscles to hold your head up, against gravity. Your body is not designed to be horizontal, but vertical.
We need to build the structure, remodeling the fascia, so it gives the proper support to the head. This is one of the goals we have in WeFlow: targeting the Fascial System to improve head and trunk control... for real!
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