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The Fountain of Youth?

by Joe Belding

A few years ago, I began to realize that I was getting older. It wasn’t just an intellectual realization: I began to experience it physically. There were mild aches and pains upon getting out of bed in the mornings, my neck and shoulders would ache at times during the day, and when I tried to take a deep breath, my chest felt a little tight. I told myself that this wasn’t too unusual for someone in their fifties, but, I have to admit, I still wasn’t too thrilled with the current state of affairs. The thing that really got my attention, however, was my left hip. It was getting stiff. When I lay on my back and drew my knees toward my chest, the left knee stopped well short of its goal. I could touch my chest with my right knee, but the left hip just wouldn’t bend enough to allow the left knee to get to my chest. Being a physical therapist, I began doing a series of stretches to increase the range of motion of my left hip. I was pretty consistent in doing these each day, and saw no results. The left hip remained as stiff and stubborn as ever. I began to think about the A word (arthritis) and wondered if there was a hip replacement surgery in my future. I stopped stretching, and did my best to ignore the problem.

It was about that time that I began to explore a series of exercises from the Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) in Lincoln, Nebraska. The PRI exercises were incredibly effective at treating various conditions such as back pain, knee pain, and neck pain. I started doing the exercises on a daily basis: if I was going to be teaching them to clients, I felt that I should be thoroughly familiar with them. As the days went by, I began to notice something happening. My neck stopped hurting, and the morning aches and pains started to fade away. When I took a deep breath, it actually felt like a deep breath. My chest didn’t feel so tight. I also began to notice that immediately following the exercises, I felt really good. I felt relaxed, refreshed, energized. I decided to keep doing them.

One day, a few months after I began the PRI exercises, I was working with a client and was checking range of motion of the hips. His left hip was limited in bending.

“I can’t get my knee to my chest anymore” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “I know what that’s like. I can’t do it either.”

As I spoke, I drew my left knee toward my chest to demonstrate the stiffness in my hip. To my very great surprise, it went all the way up to my chest without any hint of stiffness in the hip. I looked at my client and said, “Well, I used not to be able to do it”.

The Postural Restoration exercises, as well as the Postural Restoration Institute (www.posturalrestoration.com), are the life’s work of Ron Hruska, MPA, PT. The exercises are unlike any other exercises I have encountered in over thirty years as a physical therapist. They are unique because the concepts behind them are so unique and advanced. Even experienced physical therapists can find the initial courses to be a challenge, because Postural Restoration involves a new and different way of looking at the body and the interrelationships of its parts. It is definitely a “whole body” approach. What happens at one part of the body is shown to strongly influence other parts. In other words, the resting position of your hips and pelvis can have a very big effect on that right shoulder pain you have been noticing. The concepts are so advanced that they require the therapist to learn a new “language”.

(Example: You need to have left acetabulo-femoral internal rotation and good left zone of apposition to achieve and maintain right apical expansion.) Happily, people actually doing the exercises do not have to learn all the concepts and terms. They simply need to do the exercises and they can feel the results in their own bodies.

Those results can be pretty astounding. The exercises can reduce or eliminate pain in just about every area of the body, including neck, back, shoulder, knee, hip, sacroiliac, jaw, and foot. Since the exercises involve a specific way of breathing, conditions like asthma have been seen to show improvement with performance of the exercises. Recurrent headaches also can be reduced or eliminated with Postural Restoration exercises. The exercises are of tremendous benefit to people with sports-related injuries, not only in helping them to recover, but also helping prevent future injuries by making the body more resilient.

There is another area where the PRI exercises can be beneficial to us: helping us age more gracefully. As we get older, we often notice that we feel a little stiff, especially in the mornings. Balance may start to decline, and we may get out of breath more easily. These changes can be due to the postural habits of a lifetime that cause us to hold too much tension in certain muscles. As we get older, this tension increases and can restrict our movement and breathing. It can cause the bones of our skeleton to be positioned incorrectly, leading to increased wear and tear on the joints, causing pain. We start to become less active, and find it hard to remember a time when we felt really refreshed, relaxed, energized, and ready to enjoy the day.

Fortunately, PRI exercises can help to change this. They help to correct postural alignment, decrease excessive tension, and improve the efficiency of your breathing. The end result of this is that you feel better, have more energy, and enjoy life more. Of course, you don’t get something for nothing, it requires a commitment to doing the exercises daily, or at least several times a week. For me, this is not a problem, since I feel better immediately after doing the exercises. I actually look forward to doing them.

Postural Restoration has made a huge difference in my life. I am past my mid-fifties and feel better than I did in my mid-forties. Postural Restoration exercises are wonderful, almost magical, but really are not the fountain of youth. I continue to get older, I just don’t notice it as much.

Joe Belding is a physical therapist at Advance Physical Therapy, and has been practicing Postural Restoration for several years. All the physical therapists at Advance Physical Therapy have been trained in Postural Restoration and incorporate Postural Restoration into the treatment of our clients.