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The Art Of Sitting Children spend a great deal of time sitting, particularly once they are of school age. In fact a Loughborough manufacturer of classroom furniture says that “between the ages of five and sixteen, children are likely to spend around 15,000 hours sitting down”. |
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Alexander discovered that “use affects functioning” (having realised that muscle tension caused the recurring voice problems which threatened his acting career). Poor sitting posture, which often begins at school, puts strain on the muscles of the back and neck, and can affect breathing and digestion. If you are a horserider or cyclist you may well be familiar with your sitting bones. Alternatively you may know them from the way they become bruised and sore from occasional riding or cycling! Sitting on your sitting bones with your pelvis upright offers the best foundation from which the spine can lengthen up. Your feet can be flat on the floor, thus avoiding any pull on the back. Chairs often interfere with this, having backward-sloping seats which encourage us to roll back off the sitting bones, making the pelvis tilt back. We then have a much harder job to get the spine lengthening up; instead it is more likely to curve outwards in a C-shape. The plastic moulded chairs used in many schools not only have backward-sloping seats but also the chair back doesn't offer support to help lengthen the spine, instead it gives way when leaning back, exacerbating the slump. So, upright sitting is a tricky business, especially with poor furniture which may also be the wrong height. Sitting whilst engaged in a task at a desk is even more complicated. The Alexander Technique helps to change the way we respond to a stimulus. Alexander told his pupils: “ you are not here to do exercises, or to learn to do something right, but to get able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and learn to deal with it” . For children engaged in writing or drawing at a desk, the stimulus is putting pen to paper. The upper body posture is shaped by the activity of the hands and the focus of the eyes. The stimulus in this case exerts its pull forward and down, as the eyes come towards the pen and paper. The usual response to this is for the child to lean forward from the waist, with the upper back curving forward, the head and neck dropping forward and down from the tops of the shoulders. This is simply a more tightly curved C-shape than happens anyway in poor sitting, putting extra strain on the neck and shoulders as well as the lumbar spine. So having clarified how the stimulus “puts you wrong”, how should you “learn to deal with” the stimulus? Well, Alexander Technique lessons show the way to do this. Some practical tips for homework might help though: Tilt the seat forward (young children often do this instinctively) by putting something like a pair of telephone directories under the back legs of the chair, or use a sitting wedge
The Loughborough manufacturer mentioned above makes classroom furniture with sloping seats and desks which can be individually adjusted for height and slope. They can then both fit the child and the activity. Contact Stage Systems on 611021 or www.stagesystems.co.uk
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