The New Rules of Posture
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Product Description
Review
"I have long searched for a book that addresses the human body as a whole, and with clarity, guidance, and completeness. This book is a multi-faceted gem offering all of that and much more--I highly recommend it to teachers of movement and to anyone eager to learn how to become a better occupant of their body."
Product Description
Many people cause their own back and body pain through their everyday bad postural and movement habits. Many sense that their poor posture is probably the root of the problem, but they are unable to change long-standing habits. In "The New Rules Of Posture", Mary Bond approaches postural changes from the inside out. She explains that healthy posture comes from a new sense we can learn to feel, not by training our muscles into an ideal shape. Drawing from 35 years of helping people improve their bodies, she shows how habitual movement patterns and emotional factors lead to unhealthy posture. She contends that posture is the physical action we take to orient ourselves in relation to situations, emotions and people; in order to improve our posture, we need to examine both our physical postural traits and the self-expression that underlies the way we sit, stand and move. The way we walk, she says, is our body's signature. Bond identifies the key anatomical features that impact alignment, particularly in light of our modern sedentary lives and proposes six zones that help create postural changes: the pelvic floor, the breathing muscles, the abdomen, the hands, the feet and the head. This book is a resource for Pilates, yoga and dance instructors as well as healthcare professionals in educating people about postural self-care so they can relieve chronic pain and enjoy all life activities with greater ease. It contains self-help exercises and ergonomics information to help correct unhealthy movement patterns. It teaches how to adopt suitable posture in the modern sedentary world.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you are interested in exploring subtle body alignment and movement this book is a gem. Mary Bond has an easy but masterful way of encouraging a deep and profound investigation into our habitual body use. Clear illustrations, execises and explanations make this book a valuable resource for practitioners and clients alike.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
this has to be the best book I've read so far on posture and body awareness. The book takes the reader on a journey of self discovery, learning how to feel the subtleties within the body and how to have an efficient and effective body.
I would (and do) recommend this book to all bodywork therapists and anyone with an interest in improving there posture and body awareness.
I would (and do) recommend this book to all bodywork therapists and anyone with an interest in improving there posture and body awareness.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
34 reviews
60 of 65 people found the following review helpful
Body awareness to the max!!!!!!
6 Sep 2007
Format:Paperback
OH MY GOSH!!!! This book has answered so many questions for me. When I was growing up, my Mom always told me to stand up straight. Try as I might, I never was able to. Once I got older, I was told by doctors that I had a pelvis that tilted back (I know, too much information). What they didn't tell me was I could change the tilt!!!!! For the first time in my life, I can now stand up straight and have the proper curve in my back!!! The book has helped me with several other aspects that I wasn't aware of...how when you walk you're actually supposed to be pushing off with the toes of the foot that is in back (it makes walking easier, I was a heel walker). I'm only on Ch 4 (breathing) but I feel this book is worth it's weight in gold!!!!!
39 of 41 people found the following review helpful
A Useful Tool for Every Body
26 Jun 2008
Format:Paperback
The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move by Mary Bond is a must read if you're interested in increasing your somatic awareness of your body in motion. Hoorah! finally someone writes about the body as a moving entity and not as a stable unit moving just one joint at a time. Posture for Bond is not about standing still and sticking your chest out, but about how you move is number one of the new rules. Bond writes, "your posture is the product of the ongoing perceptual activities through which you orient yourself to your world."
Bond's goal is to make readers more aware of opening the body up to the world. The entire book focuses on the action of walking to gain an understanding of what Bond calls open stabilization and open orientation. These terms of Bond's encourage movement without unnecessarily tensing muscles in the body that over time develops fascial adhesions and ultimately leads to restricted movement and decreased range of motion. Fascial adhesions where two or more fascia stick together can occur in a variety of locations because fascia, the connective tissue in the body, is everywhere. In fact Bond writes that if everything in our bodies were taken away fascia would maintain a recognizable human form.
Things can get pretty complicated when posture is theorized as dynamic, but Bond is clear and precise. She divides her book into four sections: awareness, stability, orientation, and motion. Each section builds on the next. Threaded through each section are Bond's six zones of the body: breathing muscles, abdomen, pelvic floor, hands, feet and head. Bond states that all six regions are connected anatomically and unnecessary tension in any one of them causes a reaction in all of them.
To help guide the reader to change bodily habits, Bond uses explorations throughout the book. For example she writes, "stand comfortably as though you are waiting in line for movie tickets. Then take a step forward toward the ticket window. Notice which leg took the step." In this exploration entitled, "your best foot" Bond's point is that because the spine accommodates the habits you have with your legs, if you have a strong preference for one leg over the other it could cause misalignment all the way up to your jaw.
Throughout the book are fascinating facts and relationships in the body that if nothing else will help you to reconceive of your bodily connections. For example, Bond writes losing too much carbon dioxide by breathing too quickly can cause everything from depression to low back pain; she cautions against tightening the sacrum because it prevents your feet from meeting the ground successfully; and ,warns against performing the same movement over and over again. Why? Because repetition without staying aware of bodily signals diminishes our consciousness. All in all The New Rules of Posture enhances our consciousness and is a book to go back to again and again each time with a deeper understanding of the moving body.
Bond's goal is to make readers more aware of opening the body up to the world. The entire book focuses on the action of walking to gain an understanding of what Bond calls open stabilization and open orientation. These terms of Bond's encourage movement without unnecessarily tensing muscles in the body that over time develops fascial adhesions and ultimately leads to restricted movement and decreased range of motion. Fascial adhesions where two or more fascia stick together can occur in a variety of locations because fascia, the connective tissue in the body, is everywhere. In fact Bond writes that if everything in our bodies were taken away fascia would maintain a recognizable human form.
Things can get pretty complicated when posture is theorized as dynamic, but Bond is clear and precise. She divides her book into four sections: awareness, stability, orientation, and motion. Each section builds on the next. Threaded through each section are Bond's six zones of the body: breathing muscles, abdomen, pelvic floor, hands, feet and head. Bond states that all six regions are connected anatomically and unnecessary tension in any one of them causes a reaction in all of them.
To help guide the reader to change bodily habits, Bond uses explorations throughout the book. For example she writes, "stand comfortably as though you are waiting in line for movie tickets. Then take a step forward toward the ticket window. Notice which leg took the step." In this exploration entitled, "your best foot" Bond's point is that because the spine accommodates the habits you have with your legs, if you have a strong preference for one leg over the other it could cause misalignment all the way up to your jaw.
Throughout the book are fascinating facts and relationships in the body that if nothing else will help you to reconceive of your bodily connections. For example, Bond writes losing too much carbon dioxide by breathing too quickly can cause everything from depression to low back pain; she cautions against tightening the sacrum because it prevents your feet from meeting the ground successfully; and ,warns against performing the same movement over and over again. Why? Because repetition without staying aware of bodily signals diminishes our consciousness. All in all The New Rules of Posture enhances our consciousness and is a book to go back to again and again each time with a deeper understanding of the moving body.
51 of 59 people found the following review helpful
Vague and unhelpful
31 Aug 2009
Format:Paperback
I don't know how or why so many people have given this book a high rating. It has elaborate descriptions of exercises to do, but without photos, the descriptions are pretty useless. Trying to do the exercises based on the descriptions is sometimes okay but usually ridiculous. The description of the "Seated Sphinx" is impossible to follow, for example: based on this book's description, I have no idea what the exercise ought to look like or how to do it. For many of the exercises, the instructions are less about precisely what you're supposed to do than about how you ought to feel as you do the exercise, but the descriptions of how you ought to feel are often vague. And though often vague, the descriptions are incredibly long (often several pages), a fact that makes the described exercises hard to do (because how can you keep all that info in your head as you try to do the exercise?). For many exercises, you're supposed to be able to do the exercise just by "visualizing" it?!? But given that there aren't many illustrations in the book, I can't visualize anything (and I'm not sure that I believe that just visualizing something is going to make my body do it right automatically). Maybe these exercises work if you have a person who is giving you face-to-face, individual instruction as you do them, but reading from a book with hardly any photos doesn't work very well. A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, an entire book. There are a lot more helpful books out there with great descriptions and photos of exercises that really make a tremendous difference for your posture if you just do the exercise as instructed and shown (not with all sorts of pressure to feel the right sensations to get the exercise right). I recommend Anthony B. Carey's Pain-Free Program or Paul D'Arezzo's Posture Alignment or Janice Novak's Posture, Get It Straight! or even Perry Bonomo and Daniel Seidler's Why Does Working @ My Computer Hurt So Much? They're much, much, much, much better books than this one.
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