With the right technique and the latest technology, you can help your clients to achieve desired results.
If you’re a fitness professional, you might want to learn more about posture analysis. You can offer value-added service for your clients by providing this analysis.
Here, you’ll find a brief overview of posture analysis. More importantly, you’ll learn about a high-tech way to offer the service easily.
To learn more about how and why your fitness center should provide a posture analysis for your clients, keep reading.
Benefits of Good Posture
If you’re like most people, you’ve lost track of how many times you heard things like “stand up straight” in your youth. Still, this statement is valid. Good posture is essential for balance.
When you stand up straight, you center your weight over your feet. This practice also helps you to maintain the correct form while exercising.
For your clients, good posture results in fewer injuries. More importantly, it will help them to enjoy greater gains.
Good posture is important for just about any activity. Your clients might play tennis or golf. Alternatively, you may have clients who are runners.
You may even have clients who enjoy dancing or skiing. Good posture can help your clients perform all of these activities.
However, not all of your clients are athletes. Nevertheless, it still pays to maintain good posture. Good posture helps to promote balance.
Balance helps you perform simple tasks such as walking across the floor or down the block. You also need good balance to rise from a chair.
Good balance is also important for tasks such as navigating stairs and carrying packages. It’s even important for doing simple things such as looking behind you.
Just about everyone knows the benefits of good posture. However, not everyone maintains it. Your clients can develop poor posture for many reasons.
Although, balance isn’t the only benefit to good posture. Good posture can benefit people with lower back pain, help reduce headaches, increase energy levels, release shoulder and neck tension, increase lung capacity and a lot more.
Causes of Bad Posture
One of the top causes of bad posture is lack of activity. It’s well-known that a sedentary lifestyle is not good for your health. Still, many people spend most of their time sitting.
However, it’s not sitting that’s bad for you. Instead, it’s the repercussions of not moving enough that do damage.
Inactivity can result in a cascade of problems. These problems can affect your body from head to toe.
Today, people spend more time sitting every day compared to any other time in recorded history. Since 1950, sedentary jobs have increased by 83%. Now, physically active jobs make up less than 20% of all occupations.
Unfortunately, the sedentary lifestyle of most clients places unnatural stress on their vertebrates. This circumstance can lead to pain. In turn, your clients will practice poor posture to compensate for that pain.
Over time, poor posture while sitting can compress spinal discs. This circumstance is often the cause of chronic back pain. Even worse, poor posture while sitting can lead to premature degeneration of the discs
Fortunately, you can help your clients to alleviate problems such as neck and back pain. Firstly, you can provide them with ergonomic tips for proper seating posture and screen placement. You can also help your clients improve their posture with a customized exercise regimen.
How to Improve Posture
You might wonder how to improve posture. The best way to help your clients improve their posture is to provide them with exercises to strengthen their core.
These exercises should strengthen the abdominal and lower back muscles. These are the muscles that connect to the body, spine, and pelvis.
Also, this group of muscles helps people to move their torsos. They enable people to flex, extend or rotate their spines. Meanwhile, other muscles stabilize the pelvis and spine in a natural, neutral position.
You can help your clients recover their posture by making certain exercises part of their regular routine. Core stabilizer single leg extensions are a good place to start.
You can also recommend Pilates roll-ups for your clients. This exercise is also known as the yoga sit-up.
The crossover is another good exercise to help your clients to improve posture. This exercise works all core muscles and focuses on the obliques.
The back extension, or cobra pose, is another excellent exercise for promoting good posture. It will help your clients strengthen their erector spinae.
Finally, you may want to recommend the plank pose to help your customers improve their posture. This exercise strengthens the obliques and transverse abdominis.
Before you recommend exercises, however, you’ll need to assess your client’s current posture. You can accomplish this task by performing a posture analysis.
Providing Value-Added Service With Posture Analysis
Posture analysis is a subset of kinesiology. Kinesiology is a physical therapy study that focuses on the anatomy of the body. It also encompasses the physiology of body movements.
A posture analysis enables you to observe a person’s overall alignment. It also allows you to assess how your clients’ body moves and functions. More importantly, the procedure can help you to assess how their muscles and joints work together.
In general, you’re looking for abnormalities and imbalances when performing a posture analysis. You’ll then assess how these issues affect the way that your client’s body moves and functions.
By performing a posture analysis, you’ll learn whether your clients have postural deviations. You can also identify faults in their movement patterns. It’s these movements that can cause pain or discomfort.
You may also identify overactive muscles by performing a posture analysis. For example, you might find muscles that are short and tight.
Alternatively, you may find underactive muscles. Here, you’ll notice muscles that are long and weak.
Postural Assessments for Fitness Centers
Postural assessments for fitness centers are a great way to provide value-added service. In review, a posture assessment can help you to identify imbalances in abnormalities among your clients.
The best way to manage these issues is by providing your client with exercises and stretches. You’ll also want to recommend small lifestyle changes to promote better posture.
However, a one-size-fits-all plan will not work for your clients. Every one of your clients has different needs.
For this reason, you’ll need to develop a personalized exercise regimen for each one. A posture analysis is an excellent way to determine the individual needs of your clients.
The analysis will give you a wealth of information about your clients’ physiques. What’s more, it’s easy to do.
Personal training and posture analysis can work together hand-in-hand. By providing posture analysis, you can help your clients who are struggling to make progress.
The procedure will allow you to look further into the movements of your client. More importantly, it will enable you to observe how their muscles and joints work together.
By doing so, you can identify issues such as poor posture and underactive muscles. Now, you have the information you need to create an exercise program specific to the needs of your clients. Best of all, you can perform a posture analysis in mere seconds—with the right technology.
The Postural Assessment Process
The Styku 3D body scanner is the ideal machine for the postural assessment process. Other systems, like bioelectrical impedance, use current to measure your body composition. But Styku's 3D Body Scanner goes much further than just body composition. Because Styku uses a camera, it's able to see your body.
In fact, Styku's 3D Body Scanner can replicate what a trained physical therapist can see with human eyes, in terms of asymmetries and imbalances in your body. But because Styku uses a 3D camera, Styku can measure those imbalances and asymmetries in 3D with far more accuracy and consistency than the human eye.
Resultantly, the Styku 3D body scanner can deliver a 3D model of your clients’ bodies in seconds.
The Styku scanner measures body circumference. It then uses a complex equation to calculate body fat percentage accurately.
The results of the Styku 3D body scanner parallel that of a DEXA scan. A DEXA scan is the most accurate available depiction of body composition.
However, a DEXA scanner is an expensive piece of medical equipment, while the Styku 3D body scanner is much more affordable.
What’s more, a Styku scanner only takes 35 seconds to complete the scanning process. In 40 more seconds, it can compile a complete 3D image of your clients. As a result, Styku makes the scanning process easy for your clients or club members.
During the scan, your client will stand on the turntable as it rotates a few times. As the turntable moves, the scanner will take 600 infrared images.
These images will come together in a 3D model that includes your client’s entire body composition. With this information, you can develop a highly personalized training plan for your clients.
Add Profit to Your Bottom Line With Posture Analysis
Now you know more about why and how your fitness center should provide a posture analysis for clients. Hopefully, you’re on your way to outdoing your competitors by providing unparalleled services.
The Styku 3D body scanner is a new standard in fitness assessment. It’s a noninvasive scanner that automates the measurement process. Furthermore, it’s the fastest scanner available on the market. In less than two minutes, you can create stunning 3D interactive visuals for your clients.
Our software includes a robust set of built-in coaching tools. Furthermore, you can use the technology to allow your clients to compare their results with their peers.
Contact Styku today at (323) 372-2628 or connect with us online to book a free demo.
