Strong muscles keep your body upright and allow you to move. Good muscle strength and balance are critical for maintaining proper posture and minimising muscle tension. Your muscles function much like the guy wires that hold up a tall radio or television antenna. If the wires are equally strong on all sides, the antenna stands up straight. If one of the wires becomes weak or breaks, the antenna leans to the side or collapses. The same is true of your body. If the muscles on all sides of your spine are balanced and strong, your body stands up straight and strong. Unfortunately, most people do not have balanced, strong muscles, due once again to a lack of exercise and to misalignments of the spine.
Muscles are very efficient at getting stronger or weaker in response to the demands placed on them. Since most of us sit at a desk, drive a car and sit on the sofa at home, many of our muscles are not challenged and consequently become weak. At the same time, the muscles that are constantly used throughout the day become strong. This imbalance of muscle strength contributes to poor posture and chronic muscle tension. Left unchecked, muscle imbalances tend to get worse rather than better, because of a phenomenon called reciprocal inhibition.
Reciprocal inhibition literally means shutting down the opposite. For all of the muscles that move your body in one direction, there are opposing muscles that move it in the opposite direction. To keep these muscles from working against each other, when the body contracts one muscle group it forces the opposing group to relax, shutting down the opposite muscles. When consistently only one set of muscles is used, the opposing group, from being continuously shut down, is liable to weaken and waste away.
This phenomenon is especially important for people who work at a desk, because all day long the same muscles in the upper back and chest are used. This means that all day long the body is essentially shutting down the opposing muscles in the middle back. Over time, the muscles in the middle back become very weak because they are not being worked like the muscles at the front. This contributes to poor posture and chronic muscle spasms and pain. The easiest way to correct this imbalance is to do specific exercises that increase the strength of the back muscles, alongside manual therapy and chiropractic care. Once the muscles in your middle back are strong, the tightness and poor posture simply disappear.
