How to Correct Body Alignment

One would think fit people have a lower risk of experiencing pain, tightness or chronic injuries stemming from poor posture, but as a lifelong athlete and coach with almost a decade of experience, I can tell you that the opposite is true. Athletes are at greater risk for pain and injury because they have much less room for error than your typical sedentary person.

Due to the high loads, intensity, and volume characteristic of an athletic training regimen, even the slightest misalignment is amplified through hundreds of miles run and thousands of pounds lifted over a short period of time. Think about the wear and tear that occurs in a shoe that you run, jump and lift in, versus one you just walk in once in a while. The difference between shoes and our bodies is that we have the power to consciously shift our geometry in a way that will reduce wear and tear over time.

Foundational Principles

So athletes, more than anyone, need a training system that will focus and build on the basics of movement, in a way that will enhance their longevity. In this article, I will be sharing some key intentions and exercises I use to remediate postural imbalances and restore correct body alignment.

In today’s sports and fitness culture, there is an abundance of information on how to improve aspects of fitness such as strength, power, aerobic endurance, etc.

The same is true within the health industry at large. There is a ton of information.

But what is lacking, is any focus on the foundational principles on which these aspects are built: principles that anchor awareness within the body. Focusing on increasing numbers in the gym, or speed on the track, or even remediating musculoskeletal pain without first addressing these core principles will not yield you long-term results.

Form Defines Function

One of these key principles is alignment. As we see in the universe time and time again, form defines function. In the same way, our bodies are shaped and aligned in a very particular way to perform certain functions. When our bodies fall out of this alignment, it’s not just our movement and musculoskeletal system that is affected, but rather every organ system in the body. The geometry of our body dictates how organs sit in the torso, how blood flows, how signals are transduced through the nervous system, how waste is drained through the lymphatic system, and according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, how qi flows. Put simply, alignment dictates flow through the body and deviations from this natural flow (stagnancy) are what leads to dysfunction in the body.

So, if your body geometry is off, how can you expect to push toward your genetic potential for fitness?

To find proper alignment one must search internally, rather than externally. It’s necessary to tap into the intelligence of the body, learning to understand what we know, not just through our minds, but also through our bodies. Think about how you can copy movement without looking at yourself as you’re learning a new dance, or how you shoot the ball without having to consciously calculate angles and force. The same intuition can be applied to feel for correct posture. In practice, standing meditation, a set of functional exercises, and breathwork can be used to feel out and refine posture, which over time becomes another unconscious thing you maintain throughout your life. You will find a set of these exercises below.

The Focus is the Key

It is important to know, however, that these exercises and cues alone won’t do much for you. The key here is focus. You need to direct your attention inwards; create and maintain awareness of how your body feels, which muscles are activated, and how air flows in and out of your lungs. Without this, you can perform these exercises all you want, but you will not get too far. A good coach will also provide great help to guide you through this journey.

Another thing worth noting here is that you should try your best to maintain this awareness throughout the day – not just in the gym, but 24 hours a day. With practice it’s going to become natural to you, thanks to the increased inner awareness you will cultivate through training. Don’t get frustrated if at first you struggle to grasp certain feelings or if it’s hard to maintain focus. Whenever you notice yourself drifting into thought, gently bring your attention back to the intention and the exercise at hand.

Complexity of Intention

I already spoke about the 3 base level intentions that can be applied to any movement. As movement gets more complex, these fundamental intentions still remain, but it may be useful to add an extra layer of complexity of intention. For example, when running, it will definitely be helpful to relax but to further enhance one’s understanding of the movement, it can be beneficial to bring focus to the nature of how your feet contact the ground, or to the path that your feet cycle in through your stride.

As you build a good understanding of the most basic intentions, it will become easier to apply the more specific ones. As you advance to shift your focus toward the more advanced cues, don’t lose sight of the basics as those give the foundation. Lose them and you will probably fall out of alignment all over again – so it’s better to progress slowly but surely.

Exercises to Correct Body Alignment

Utilize these methods to enhance your awareness and improve your body’s alignment

Standing Meditation

Learning to orient your body first with no movement at all is crucial in improving your overall alignment and movement mechanics since movement is simply maintaining correct alignment in a dynamic way.

To start, stand about feet shoulder-width apart. Drop your attention/awareness down to the space directly above the perineum, directly in front of the tailbone, about 3 fingers beneath the belly button (similarly to how you would focus on your bicep to isolate it while doing bicep curls).

Maintain even pressure through the three points of the foot (think of your feet like tripods)
Let your tailbone drop down and feel your lower back lengthen/relax
In the same way, you allow the tailbone to drop, feel the sternum/bottom of the rib cage subtly drop to create a cylindrical connection to the pelvis
Stay tall through the crown of the head and subtly tuck the chin in – feel this create space in the mid-spine, creating room for the shoulders to naturally drop into place
The area labeled chi belt in the picture below should feel connected all around, but fluid and supple at the same time
Keep this at the center of your focus while allowing these other postural nuances to fall into place:

As your focus improves throughout a meditation session and also longer term, you will feel increased levels of activation and connection to your feet and hips/glutes among other areas of the body.

Loaded Swaps

Loaded swaps are great for learning how to integrate the function of the feet with the rest of the body’s alignment.

Without proper activation of the feet, it is impossible to maintain proper alignment since the structure of our body begins from the ground up.

In performing the single-leg swap, bring your awareness to the weight distribution through your foot. Notice how you must adjust the activation patterns not just through your feet, but also through your core in order to maintain proper posture and balance. Notice how activation of certain parts of the foot is intricately linked to activation through specific areas of the core/hips.

Lunge swaps

In addition to bringing awareness to the feet and their connection to the rest of the body, swapping the weight in a lunge has other benefits as well.

The muscles involved with holding a lunge are on stretch when at the bottom of the movement. Muscle spindles provide our nervous system with the most proprioceptive feedback when muscles are in a stretched position.

This enhanced feedback strengthens the “mind-muscle connection” and allows you to make the micro-adjustments necessary to optimize your posture.

Slow Tempo Lifts

This training modality is nothing new in the fitness industry. It entails performing the eccentric or negative phase of a lift in a controlled manner and holding the stretched position for a few seconds before completing the lifting/concentric portion of the movement.

The same mechanism that makes lunge swaps effective is what’s at play here. By lengthening the amount of time working muscles are eccentrically loaded (on stretch), greater positional feedback is relayed between the body and the mind, making it easier to adjust total-body alignment as you lift. Below is an example.

Challenging Core and Hip Work

The core’s job is to keep us in an alignment in which no one part of the body, especially the spine, handles load in excess of what it was meant to handle. The core evenly absorbs and transmits force across the body, similar to the suspension system of a car.

Why does our core lose its proper function over time? There are a variety of factors involved: training with machines that provide external stabilization and don’t require much stabilization to be generated from within the user’s body, seating that allows for the inactivity of the core muscles for prolonged periods of time (see the first picture of the article), poor form when performing core-focused training, etc.

To properly activate your core during your training, utilize these guidelines:

Free weights should make up the bulk of your resistance training.
Every exercise should be treated like a core exercise – the core should be working in every single movement from squat, to bench press, to running, and even sitting. Consciously activate the core until proper firing patterns become second nature.
Use breathing to guide your core training; feel the breath fill the entirety of your torso (low back, belly, chest, upper back, etc.).

Training the core directly is a good way to bring awareness to the area of your body in which movement originates. Think of core training as improving coordination rather than strength or endurance, at least at first. When the core muscles fire in the pattern that they should, strength will come naturally simply because you will be using your body according to how it was naturally designed to.

Running

The repetitive nature of running provides ample opportunity to get in tune with your body and anchor awareness in movement.

Use these cues to bring awareness to different aspects of your body and your running motion to get the most alignment improvement:

Maintain awareness in your center and feel how your extremities, down to your fingers and toes, are intricately connected to your center through distinct lines of tension/channels.
Maintain a tall spine up through the crown of the head.
Keep foot contacts light.
Bring on a sensation of lightness and relaxation to the whole body.

Applying these intentions to training, creating internal awareness, and maintaining an intense focus on what’s happening inside my body has helped me crush my athletic goals and become my very best throughout this past season. Now I apply the same intentions in my programs, encouraging my clients to become more mindful not just about movement, but about how the body operates as a whole.

I believe that to reach your full potential as an athlete, technique, and strength on their own are not enough. To optimize the way we move and function, we need to anchor our focus on the body and follow internal guidance. To help others do that, I developed the Mind Your Movement Method with the intention of helping aspiring athletes and fitness enthusiasts realize their true potential through improving mind-body control and training the mind to focus. The result is enhanced physical and mental health.

Follow Stefan Duvivier on Instagram @airduvi