﻿Hi there, my name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you again for joining me. We are going to be looking today at dynamic posture. And you might be wondering what that is. So, dynamic means moving. So it's postures that we're moving into and out of. What we'll do today is we'll start off with a little explanation as to what dynamic posture is, and then we will look at an activity that looks at your dynamic posture. You don't really need any equipment for this today, you just need yourself, but perhaps you might need a parent or carer to help you. I would just like to give you a little message from our team. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. So you may be watching this as a child by yourself or you might be with a parent or carer. We will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. And each lesson, we will aim to give you some ideas and activities that can be carried out either at home or in school. You may already have specific programmes that you're using, or advice that has been given to you by your child's school or therapist. So please make sure that you're using any information I'm giving you alongside anything you already have. And if you do have any questions, or would like help tailoring this to their needs, then please make sure you get in contact with your local therapy service. So let us start by talking through what is dynamic posture. A dynamic posture is the position of your body parts when you are moving. So it is the position or positions of readiness to move. And for example, it can be actions such as walking, running, or bending over to pick something up. You can also think of things like downhill skiing and racing in a canoe, where postural change happens very quickly between their movements. And if you've ever watched videos of people doing skiing, or perhaps in the Olympics, when people are doing their canoe racing, you can see that they have to make very quick adjustments to their posture in order to keep that balance and stability. And your dynamic posture is really important for moving efficiently and for your muscles working well together. I would say even more important than in a static posture, because the changes can happen quickly when you're moving between different postures. So, a way to remember it, if you think of static posture, when you are still and your dynamic posture when you are moving into and out of different postures. What do you need to remember when you're thinking about your dynamic posture? You need to still keep that awareness of your spine during movements. So still remembering those alignments of your spine and thinking about all those natural curves. You also really want to minimise the stress on your joints during movement. By this, I mean not putting your spine in difficult positions and holding in there for too long. Even more so in your dynamic posture, you need to really be thinking about your base of support, because when you're moving, your base of support will change quite a few times. And lastly, there, all of this feeds into thinking about your balance and stability, which is really important for your dynamic posture when you're moving. I'm now going to demonstrate an activity to get you thinking about your dynamic posture. So this activity is going to be marching on the spot. Try this activity and it will get you thinking about your posture when you move. So to begin with, I like you to stand with your feet directly below your hips so you are stable and balanced. And I want you to start lifting up one knee up and down and then the other so you begin to march. And really think about your posture as you're moving. If you've watched my demonstration now, at the end, pause the video, have a go yourself and then restart to join me again. I'm now going to demonstrate marching on the spot as an activity for you to try. So watch this video and then pause it at the end and you'll be able to have a go yourself. So your starting position, you want to have your feet directly below your knees and your hips and you want to stand so you've got a good stable base. And I want you to start off by lifting one knee at a time. So you're lifting one up, and as you drop one, you lift the other one like you're marching on the spot. So here it's good to think about your posture, because as you start moving, your base starts changing. So I'm showing you from the front. Now I'm going to show you from the side. So I want you to think about your posture and what could happen. You might start getting some rounding of your back. So if you do, I want you to think about your tummy and your back muscles. So to start with, don't lift your legs very high, just do some nice, gentle marching. Let's think about how we can make this a little bit harder perhaps or a little bit easier. So for the first thing to make it a little bit harder, you could try adding our arms in for marching. You wants to do your opposite arm with your opposite leg. So you're swinging your arms in rhythm with your legs. So just see how your posture feels in this position as well. Are you able to keep that nice position of your back? And if you'd like to make it even more challenging, you can speed your marching up. So you could lift your knees a bit higher and you could swing your arms. And again, think about your posture while you're doing this. So thinking about simplifying it, you could just do smaller knee lifts, and also do the lifts for short amount of time. So don't do your marching for a long period of time. Start off really slow and maybe build it up and just see how you get on. You can always Watch the video back again, and then have another go yourself. I'll talk you through the extended simplified versions that are written here, as I demonstrated just before. So you can make it a little bit more challenging by trying to add in your arms. So moving them backwards and forwards in rhythm with your legs. It can be quite a good coordination exercise as well. And also to make it more challenging, you can speed up your marching, and just keep an eye on what happens to your posture while you're doing this. To make it easier, why don't you try some smaller knee lifts? So you're doing some gentle marching on the spot. And also, slow down your marching and see what happens to your posture when you do this. Give those a try, pause the video now and now join me afterwards. So that is now the end of our lesson today. Thank you very much for joining me and I hope you found some useful things there. It's really interesting learning about dynamic posture, isn't it? Because sometimes I think people think posture is just when you're sitting still. So actually learning a little bit more about it can be really interesting. All that leaves me to say now is thank you again. Take care and I hope to see you again soon. Goodbye.

How posture changes when you start to move

In this lesson, we will be looking at what dynamic posture is and use an activity to get you to think about how posture changes when you start to move. Resources provided by University of Gloucestershire (CC BY-NC-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0)

Lesson overview:Dynamic posture

Core Content

Content guidance

Supervision Level

Posture: