Question

a. Describe the typical postural alignment of upright standing posture when observing a person from each of the three planes.

b. The plantar flexors are considered a postural control muscles during upright standing posture. Describe how this muscle group function during upright standing position.

Answer 1

Posture Allignment:

A good posture is always essential for an healthy spine. This good upright posture is also referred as neutral spine. the right posture is that all the 33 vertebrae in the spinal column appears to be vertical.

Allignment from the planes:

Upfront posture remains the same in all planes except for the sagittal plane as it differs with age and gender. Many experiements were conducted to prove on the same.

Changes in body posture arise due to ageing. This has been identified through correlation analysis. There is a correlation between the age with the neck and thorax and knee region and not with the hip. These results proves that aging has effects on body posture, especially on segments of upper body and lower limbs.

The dynamic change that occurs with aging as there is a change in the body posture. he overall trends of neck and thorax are similar: they are both decreasing with aging, especially from around the age of around 50 to 70 yrs, and they decrease little from around 30 to 50 yrs. After the age of 70 yrs, the neck angle has a slight increasing trend, while thorax angle does not. These results suggest that both cervical lordosis and thoracic kyphosis develop with aging especially since around 50 yrs and cervical lordosis recovers in population over around 70 yrs. On the contrary, the knee angle shows a steady increasing trend with aging , which suggests that when in standing position, the knees become more and more difficult to be extended out straightly and be flexed with aging.

The plantar flexors

These are the muscles that are located in the posterior part of the leg along with the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles. This muscle is very important for foot flexibility and balance. If there is any injury in the muscles, the area swells up and causes inflammation. This swelling will eventually limit the movement. Standing is one of the basic daily activities that involves and is influenced by the contraction of plantar flexor muscles. The common feature in plantar flexor activity between steady contraction at low-contraction intensity and standing. It was thus hypothesized that the variability in postural sway during quiet standing is associated with force fluctuations during steady contractions of plantar flexor muscles at low-contraction intensity. Hence plantar flexor muscles play a vital role in the posture of an upright body.