Good posture when breastfeeding – bottle feeding too!

Woman breastfeeding

Woman breastfeedingFeeding a baby can take up a fair proportion of a parent’s day and so it’s important to be comfortable both for yourself and for your baby. Whether breastfeeding or bottle feeding, it’s easy to focus more on the baby than yourself and this is where back pain can set in. Here are some top tips for looking after your posture for comfortable breastfeeding:

  • Back support: You need support for your upper back, ideally between the shoulder blades. It’s important that your back is upright rather than slouched. If the seat is deep, such as on a sofa, you may need 2 or 3 cushions to support your upper back.
  • Neck pain prevention: When looking at your baby, either to see if he has latched on or if you are looking in her eyes, think about what is going on with your head and neck. Use your eyes more to look down and if you need to tilt your head, nod your head from the head-neck balancing joint between the ears rather than shoving your head down from a lower point in the neck.
  • Shoulder pain: Are your shoulders up by your ears? Ensure the baby is supported well, especially with a newborn. You can raise the baby’s height by putting cushions underneath so the baby is brought up to the breast, rather than breast to baby. This will also help over-curving your back.
  • Leg tension: When sitting, are you on tiptoes? Try putting something under your feet so that your legs can relax. If the baby is too low, see the tip above on using cushions.
  • Anxiety: Feeding doesn’t come easily to everyone and can be a time that is fraught with anxiety. Taking your time to make yourself comfortable will quieten your body that will feed through to the baby and can also help calm your mind.

It is a great pleasure for me to work with a mum who is feeding her baby. Helping her to get a sense of comfort, often for the first time, shows with a smile in her face and a peacefulness in the room that is almost tangible. As well as showing her how to set herself up when at home or out and about, I also work hands on to help build relaxation in her body.

Chair Design – function plus form

S Chair with person sitting in it

 

Man sitting uncomfortably on S Chair
S Chair © Christine Ackers

It’s not ideal for our health to sit for too long. Two factors are of key importance: our posture at the chair and the type of chair itself that we sit on.

Christine Ackers writes in Connected Perspectives that:

‘… the first criterion for judging a chair must be that sitting on it does no harm.’

She illustrates in some glorious sketches how chairs that have won awards for design may be at best uncomfortable and at worst impossible to sit on. Ideally, a chair design should look good but just as importantly, if not more so, it should support a natural upright posture. Many chairs have a seat that leans backwards including design classics such as the Wassily chair:

Wassily chair
Wassily Chair © Christine Ackers

 

These tilt the pelvis back and curve our spines.

We need to be on our sitting bones – the two rocker-type bones at the base of our pelvis. This requires a flat seat base that has no side to side curves or front to back ones and is not backwards leaning. This, then, rules out the Panton Chair…

Panton Chair
Panton Chair © Christine Ackers

 

… and the Transat, neither of which support good postural use.

Transat Chair
Transat Chair © Christine Ackers

Back pain at work supposedly ‘caused by the computer’ is often determined by how we sit at the chair as well as what we sit on. A lot of money can be expended on designer office chairs when it’s learning how to sit properly that is the real key. Christine Ackers shows that it’s the marriage or sitting well as well as choosing a chair that suits function as well as form that is a happy one.

All drawings above by Joe Wauters and Jing Sheng Wang.

Connected Perspectives has a whole range of new articles with subjects that have never previously been collated, all showing the diversity of the Alexander Technique, including writings on:

  • cycling, skiing, sex
  • creativity in music and movement
  • utopian societies in literature
  • mindbody disciplines in eastern and western societies
  • reflections on learning

Text Neck from Poor Posture

Drawing showing strain on neck if leaning forward in neck


AT drawings - strain on neck

Holding your head down to look at a mobile when texting can put a real strain on the body. A recent study states that texting can harm your health.  Poor posture is one of the main causes.

Text Pain, Neck Pain

Our heads are quite heavy, around 4-5kg. This is the weight of 4-5 litres of water:

AT drawings - weight of head in water

Better Posture

This is fine when the head is in balance. But tip the head forward and start multiplying those bottles of water.

Thus good posture and head balance is important. This is what the Alexander Technique is all about. Imagine a point between your ears. This is where the head neck joint is.

Drawing of Natural Head Balance restored by the Alexander Technique

Forehead Forward

Next, consider that the forehead faces forward and doesn’t tilt upward. We don’t need to fix it the head into place but need to think for it to be in balance.

Drawing of Head Neck Balance for correct posture

Phone to eyes, not head to phone

Now let’s bring the phone into the picture. Instead of tilting the head down, we can bring the phone upwards towards the eyes. This leaves the head neck balance alone and takes the strain off the neck, back and shoulders.

Alexander Technique Lessons

Any Alexander Technique practitioner can help you learn the skill of ‘mind talking to muscle’. We help you to understand what natural body use is and how to achieve it for yourself. We have a very gentle touch which guides the body how to let go more, even when it may have spent years, or even decades, holding on for dear life.

Call now to book an appointment and start taking care of your spine.

Housework – the dreaded hoovering

Hoovering can be uncomfortable and can make your back ache.  What can happen is that you stand fairly still and overuse the arms – pushing and pulling with your arms, making loads of effort.  This leads to bending forward, often putting strain on the lower back.  Here are some ideas to experiment with:

  1. Make the handle long enough so that you don’t need to bend as you hoover
  2. As you hoover, step or rock forward and back – a bit like doing a dance – and the hoover handle will just move with you
  3. Reduce your effort and let the hoover do the work.  Make the suction right for the surface.  If it’s too high, you have to make an effort to move the brush; if it’s too low, then you have to go over the surface more times.

Hoovering is my least favourite chore.  And that’s worth noting because if you dread something, then you tend to tighten up before even starting it.  So I have a little chat with myself to think that it might not be that bad.  And I sometimes plug myself into some music to dance as I hoover.  It’s so much better that way.

Riders – learn like an Olympian

Deborah Criddle who won a gold and two silver medals at the London 2012 Paralympics has been having Alexander Technique lessons as part of her training schedule.  In an interview after the Paralympics she stated:

“For the last year I have been having regular weekly Alexander Technique lessons both on the ground and on a mechanical horse. It has proven so beneficial that I shall continue with them for the foreseeable future.”

Two colleagues, Claire Rennie and Kamal Thapen, and I are  running a workshop for horse riders on Saturday 2 March 2013 in central London.  We’re using static saddles so that riders can experiment with their posture and seat without the horse taking this as a signal to gallop off!