A Good Posture

Good posture is important for a healthy slim and attractive personality. Posture means straight way of walking with your head held high. With correct posture you will look young, smart and graceful. Bad posture leads to both health and beauty problems. It leads to double chin, heavy waist, sagging breasts and protruding stomach. It also leads to health problems like tired feet, backache, headache and poor digestion.

To maintain a good posture, you must start working on yourself from the moment you wakeup in the morning. When you get up you should hold your head highest as though a string is in the middle of your skull holding it up. Think of your head being kept perfectly balanced by the imaginary cord. If we walk tall and straight, our spine and muscles will carry out the work of supporting our body weight properly. But if we do not walk properly and we walk with a stoop, these muscles have to do the job for which they are not meant. Therefore, people with a slouch get tired more easily than people who walk and stand straight. Besides walking tall and straight we must also learn to sit properly. When we are in a sitting position our spine should always rest against the back of the chair. The shoulders should be straight and the body relaxed. It should never stoop forwards. Legs will look slim and trim if you sit on the chair with one foot slightly in front of the other or crossed at the ankles to one side. Crossing legs at the knees tends to cut off the flow of blood to the legs which may result in painful and ugly varicose veins.

Now we come to the posture of bending and picking up anything from the floor. Do not pick up and lift anything with straight legs. Instead you should try and keep your back straight, now bend at the knees and pick up the thing. But when you are picking up anything heavy, you should keep your back relaxed and your body should be bent forwards so that there it more even distribution of weight throughout the body. When you are traveling by bus, train or ship always stand with your legs wide apart. This way you will not fall even if you are travelling at high speed. To learn to walk tall and straight you can walk around every day for 10 minutes with a heavy book balanced on your head. A good back straightener is to pass a walking stick through the elbows. Hold it lightly across the back. Do this every day for 10 minutes and you will improve your posture considerably. Here is the best posture exercise.

1. Stand straight. Keep the chest raised and the chin in.
2. Draw in your tummy and tuck in your hips so that the hollow in the back is reduced.