Newsflash: don’t imitate models
Ever since I had the baby, I’ve struggled with my posture. Soon after Drake was born, I reached for something and had a shooting pain in my hand. I went to get it checked out and saw a family doctor, a chiropractor, and finally a physical therapist before someone ventured their best guess that the problem was a weakness in the midback, translating to a weakness in the shoulder, and travelling down to the hand from there. When I did the recommended exercises, the shooting pain went away. When I slacked off, my hand became numb at night and I would experience periodic numbness all along the arm. I’m back, then, to doing the exercises and feeling better. I’m very conscious of not rounding my shoulders, though it’s hard to pick up and carry the 25-pound Drake without doing so.
I get tremendously aggravated, therefore, when I see catalogs and magazines in which the model is posed in that round-shouldered posture, like this. This is not only bad physically, but in the yogic tradition it shuts in the heart, so it’s bad emotionally, as well.
My friend NYC Bette has worked with actual models, and says that the stereotypes are often true: vapid people who smoke a lot, eat very little, do a lot of drugs, and don’t even exercise because the development of muscle might alter their body and make the clothes not fit.
Ignore the models. It’s an unhealthy stance, one that only gets exacerbated by the physicality of motherhood, with breadfeeding and baby carrying. Madonna had it right, way back before she was even a mom or into yoga: open your heart.
The tendency is to overcorrect and arch the lower back and stick out the boobs. This doesn’t help; it’s just bad in a different way. Instead, the correction is to breathe into your middle back and open your heart, projecting it as if you had a lovely pendant at the top of your collar bone that you wanted to show to good effect. Also helpful is to lie on the floor with a rolled towel under the spine between the shoulderblades.