The significance of posture correction for teenagers

The core significance of adolescent posture correction has never been about “cultivating a good temperament” or “becoming more beautiful” as the public thinks, but rather maintaining the healthy baseline of bone development in adolescence while avoiding chain damage to mental state and athletic ability caused by long-term posture abnormalities. This is the most intuitive conclusion I have come to after seven years of youth sports rehabilitation and exposure to nearly a thousand cases.

Last week, a 14-year-old boy in the second grade of junior high school was picked up at the outpatient clinic. He was dragged in by his mother with a hunched back. He said that his back had been hurting for almost half a year. His family always thought it was because he was tired from homework. After taking a X-ray, they discovered that the curvature of the thoracic spine had straightened and he also had mild scoliosis. He himself said that he usually sat in the last row, always hunched his neck to look at the blackboard, and was too lazy to move after class. He would sit in his seat and watch short videos, even holding his breasts in his mouth when playing ball. His classmates used to laugh at him as a "little old man", but he was even less willing to look up and stared at his toes when walking.

Many parents have two extreme attitudes towards this matter. They are either extremely anxious and slap their children on the back when they see their children lowering their heads, or they don't take it seriously at all, thinking that "children don't have waists" or "they will naturally become taller when they grow up." It just so happens that there are two schools of thought in the industry that have been arguing for several years: One school is the "early intervention school", which believes that as long as problems such as high and low shoulders, forward head, and rounded shoulders are found, systematic training and even wearing of braces must be done immediately. The earlier the correction, the better the effect. ； The other school is the "natural development school", which believes that the skeletal muscles of teenagers are still growing. As long as the bad posture is corrected, they can repair themselves. There is no need to burden the child with excessive medical treatment.

I have encountered many cases myself, and I actually feel that both sides are right. It depends on the specific situation. There was a little girl in fifth grade who used to tilt her body when doing homework. She usually danced ballet three times a week and had sufficient core strength. I just adjusted the height of her desk and specifically told her mother not to keep complaining about her bad posture. I checked again after three months and found that there was no problem. But if you have persistent neck and back pain, or if you take an X-ray and find that the spinal Cobb angle (the core indicator for clinically measuring the degree of scoliosis) has exceeded 10 degrees, then waiting for "self-repair" will be a waste of time. This was the case with the 16-year-old girl I met last year. Her mother heard from relatives that "it's normal for children to have a hunchback." After a year of delay, the curvature increased from 12 degrees to 20 degrees. In the end, she had to customize a brace and had to wear it 22 hours a day. Even her long-distance running training for the high school entrance examination was affected. The girl cried several times when she came for the consultation. She said she would have come to see her if she had known better.

Many people only focus on the impact of posture on the body. In fact, for children of this age, the hidden psychological impact may last longer. Let’s talk about the 14-year-old boy at the beginning. When he first came here, his head was buried almost to his chest, and he answered everything in a low voice. After three weeks of adjustment, he was completely relaxed when he came back. When he walked in, he held up a basketball and waved it to me. He said that he won the best of the game as a forward in the class basketball game last week, and now his classmates no longer call him "little old man." Don't tell me, adolescent children are very sensitive. A nickname related to their body shape may shrink them for several years, making them afraid to raise their hands in class, speak on stage, or socialize with classmates. This kind of impact is beyond the pain of two days.

Speaking of which, I myself had round shoulders when I was a child. My mother didn’t understand at that time. She would pat my back when she saw me holding my breasts while walking on the street. The more she patted me, the more nervous I became and the more I shrank. Later, I became obsessed with hip-hop dancing in junior high school. I practiced shoulder opening and core training every day. After dancing for half a year, people around me asked me why I suddenly grew taller. In fact, I just straightened my back, and visually I was five or six centimeters taller. So I am now giving advice to parents. I will never ask them to sign up for tens of thousands of dollars in orthodontic classes. First, ask their children what sports they like. Basketball, swimming, dancing or even skateboarding are all fine. As long as they can make them willing to move and stretch their bodies, it is 100 times more effective than staring at them every day to "raise their chests and raise their heads".

Last year, we jointly conducted a posture screening with three local junior high schools. Among students aged 12 to 15, 62% had posture problems of varying degrees, of which less than 8% were pathological. The rest were all problems caused by long-term lowering of the head to browse mobile phones, improper desk height, and long periods of sedentary life. Many parents don't know that teenagers' bones have high organic matter content and are more than three times more plastic than adults. Mild posture problems can be adjusted in a month or two by finding the right cause and spending 10 minutes a day practicing two small movements. The cost is extremely low and the effect is particularly good. If you wait until the bones are completely calcified at the age of 18 before you want to change it, you will either have to endure neck, shoulder, waist and leg pain for a long time, or you will have to undergo orthodontic surgery. You may not be able to fully recover even if you spend money and suffer.

Oh, by the way, I would like to remind everyone that there are a lot of corrective products on the market now, such as good backs, smart corrective belts, and various internet celebrity corrective exercises. Don’t just give them to your children. The kind of corrective belt that forcibly pulls the shoulders back relies on external force to straighten the person, but the strength of the muscles itself cannot keep up. If worn for a long time, the muscles will atrophy. If you take them off, they will return to their original shape immediately. ； There are also private bone-setting clinics outside where you can break the neck and spine of a child casually, which is extremely risky. A child was so broken that his cervical vertebra was dislocated and he was almost paralyzed. The reliable process is to first go to a regular hospital or rehabilitation institution for a comprehensive evaluation, take X-rays to confirm whether there are any organic changes, and then find the root cause - is it a posture problem? Or is it a muscle strength imbalance? Or are the tables and chairs too short? Only targeted adjustments are useful.

Actually, let's talk about it, how can there be so much lofty significance in adolescent posture correction? To put it bluntly, it is to help children develop a habit that makes them comfortable during the critical years of body growth. They don't have to be troubled by neck and back pain every day, and don't have to feel inferior because of their posture. When they grow up, they will sit in the office and work overtime, and they will suffer less cervical spondylosis and lumbar protrusion than others. Isn't this enough?