Many people focus on work capacity, output, fitness, pain tolerance, motivation.
Yet, in movement, sports, endurance activities, physical labour or general training, there is potency in something much simpler.
Our performance is largely dictated by how “well” we are doing the task, our technique. Our technique is built on our “posture.” How we are positioned at any one time.
Understanding the type of posture that the movement calls for, then being able to actually achieve this, is incredibly valuable.
When we watch elite marathon runners, even inside of the top ten, we will see some big changes in posture across the race. First and second place usually maintain the same posture that they started with. Even by tenth place though, we usually notice postural changes over the course of the race.
The “checking in” of the posture is important as time passes and energy is dissipated. In this case, how it starts is not how it ends
For us, when we set out do do something, what kind of posture do we need? Is it tall, upright, rigid? Or loose, relaxed. Where do we hold tension? Where can we relax? Where do we look, how do we position our hands?
Perhaps most importantly, how do we breathe?
How we breathe coupled with postural awareness improves our performance, our daily wellbeing, our energy, our mood.
Rather than going straight to the right hand side of the equation – the output, try slowing down, spending extra time on the inputs: how to set up and execute with the posture and positions that the task requires.
