If you were to be asked to complete a postural assessment, your therapist will almost certainly ask you to assume a number of standing and sitting poses. From there, depending on your reasons and intentions for seeking the therapist’s help, you may also be asked to lie down, walk, crouch, or kneel. As you move from one position into another, your therapist may look at how your body performs between postures, and how your body is shaped when you hold them.

During a postural analysis, therapists are usually most interested in observing the features that are most consequential to the therapies they provide. For example, osteopaths and chiropractors may pay most attention to how your spine and joints perform during movement. Physiotherapists may want to know how your muscles interact when you’re mobile. Massage therapists may show interest in the your muscles relax when you are inactive. However, although a therapist’s attention will usually be guided by her or his specialisation, the differences between their scopes isn’t that clear-cut in reality.

What any therapist will be looking for are those features that appear to deviate most from what should appear as your most natural physique and alignment. Whereas some of these features will be obvious, others may only be detectable by well-trained therapeutic eyes. Once detected, it will then be the therapist’s job to assess whether the concerning features can be treated and, if so, how to address them best.

Our mind shapes us

Any physical or manual therapist must understand the root causes for your bodywork needs and requirements before they can work successfully with you. While you might be able to point at the locations where your concerns are most noticeable, your ideas about their origins may not always be accurate. That is by no means a reflection of your intelligence or awareness. In most cases, the discomforts you may be pointing at are merely the symptoms of past injuries you may have forgotten about. A sore lower back may actually be caused by an unnatural gait which, in turn, may come from a decade-old knee injury. A dulling neck pain may still stem from a rib that became broken in your teenage years. An uncomfortable hip may be caused by ankle injury that even after years failed to heal properly. The true origins of your physical discomforts are seldom obvious, and therefore often tricky to identify. It can take therapists many, many years of training and practice before they can consider themselves proficient in the arts and sciences that are foundational to body reading.

The sources of your physical discomforts become even harder to identify when non-physical trauma is at play. This is where your conscious and subconscious response memories of accidents, abuse, or natural disasters come into play. Such memories shape all of us, and quite literally so. If you developed certain fears as a consequence of such events, you may walk less upright than you used to before those fears entered your life. Similarly, living with constant anger may have contracted certain parts of your body, which may eventually affects how your physique developed and maintained itself. When persistent feelings of shame, anger, guilt, and joy became embedded your psyche, you may find that those will eventually affect how you present yourself to the world in daily life. Whether we like it of not, our bodies modify themselves around how we perceive ourselves. In many cases, those modifications affect not only our postures but also our ideas about what our natural – and unnatural – posture actually looks and feels like.

We see examples of this daily at our practice. While most of our clients accept they are ‘somewhat’ out of alignment, only a very few believe at first the measurements we take during our intake assessment. Some may be convinced that they are holding their shoulders perfectly across a horizontal plane where, in fact, one side may be much lower than the other – sometimes by as much as 2 centimeters (4/5″). Considering the architectural complexities of our human anatomy, innumerable other examples can be given of how our postures can present in an unnatural state. The point here is not that we do not accept that this can happen with our own physiques – which is something most clients will readily accept – but about our unawareness of the extent by which their bodies have become unbalanced and misaligned.

While it is absolutely important to make clients aware of their unique postural features with proper and objective measurements, we firmly believe that bodywork therapists must do more than just taking measurements to make a postural assessment meaningful to the design of their treatments. However, that ‘going further’ is unfortunately not standard practice, which could very well explain why so many of our new clients feel they didn’t received the therapeutic attention, and therefore relief, they deserved previously.

The Art and Sciences of bodywork treatment design

Because our bodies reflect what’s going on in our mind, and because our mind is utterly unique to each of us, we believe it is impossible to design effective bodywork treatments if we were match your physical concerns with standardised mechanical and mostly technically-focused bodywork routines. Unfortunately, this is exactly what too many other bodyworkers still seem to do. No matter how technically sound and appropriate their work may be, if it doesn’t align with your client’s unique mental and emotional constitution, the effects of treatments will likely be only be temporary at best. Instead, to design and deliver treatments that result in more enduring quality of life enhancements, we focus just as much on how and where you need treatment as on why you believe you might be needing it. Once we’ve traced the symptoms back to their origins, we question why symptoms are manifesting, and what can be done to trace these back to their origins to alleviate or even eliminate them at source.

In that sense, our approach to postural assessments can be liked to a reverse treasure hunt. Here, ‘x’ marks your symptoms, which may be a physical region you can identify, such as a painful shoulder, troublesome hip, or an obstinate ankle. From there we begin to unravel that symptom’s story, if you like, right back to its inception.

That approach explains in large parts why the bodywork treatments we provide at Advaya Healing differ from those offered by other manual therapists. One significant difference is that all of our treatments are guided by that virtual treasure hunt during which we explore all aspects of your being, not just the physical. This then informs a second difference; we work with you – rather than on you – to design your bodywork treatments. The reason for this is simple; as you are the only person who can recall the memorised remnants of your lived experiences, only you shed light on the non-physical factors that may contribute to the manifestation of your concerns. The maps we will follow to get to the origins of your concerns must therefore always be products of co-creation, in which we continuously match our therapeutic bodywork expertise with every new discovery you make about your physical, emotional, and mental self during and between our sessions.

Advaya’s Postural Assessments – your Lonely Planet Guide, of You

Our idea of treasure hunts converges with how postural assessments are actually performed, in that both are typically guided by maps. While these maps show different landscapes – that of a topographical geography, or that of our human anatomy – the purpose of both is to explain how one observation fits within a larger reality. The most important question a map needs to answer is how our current position – or focus – relates that the place where we need to be. Once we know, we can then set way points that help us navigate to our next destiny in short and measurable intervals.

We know from experience that there are many different maps available to support postural analyses. Some publishers make theirs available online as either paid-for or free downloadable files. Others are included in textbooks, which can then be copied and modified for use. We also know of therapists who draw their own maps, either to be used as templates or simply as one-off drawings that only show what needs to be remembered. Because none of the maps we found seemed to adequately align with the unique bodywork treatments we provide, we set out to develop our own maps, which launched us into an eight-week process and resulted last week in a female and male version.

These maps, which are now proprietary to Advaya Healing, show a person from four different perspectives – front (anterior), back (posterior), left, and right. Each perspective includes a series of scales that allow us to mark the specific features of your physique. Once completed, the map can then be used to identify how these features interrelate. Findings can then inform our explorations of the physical and non-physical factors that may be causing your body to act as it does.

What makes these maps even more unique is that the positioning of the scales align with the reference literature we use most often to design our bodywork treatments. This allows us to follow a two-pronged approach – to design our treatments in full collaboration with each individual client and, at the same time, to further augment each treatment option with the teachings and findings of some of the world’s most experienced practitioners. Over time, and as sessions progress, multiple postural assessment maps may make our client’s recovery journey not just visible but also measurable.

Postural Assessment Maps & Making bodywork extraordinary

From Monday, 27 June 2022 onward we will start using our new postural assessment maps with all clients who book an Initial Bodywork Consultation. Additionally, we may also use these maps with existing clients who are interested in redoing their intake assessment.

We deliberately set the date two weeks out as we are also hoping to launch another practice initiative that will go hand-in-hand with these maps. I will make another announcement on that initiative, hopefully by the end of this week.

The introduction of these maps will set our practice onto a new course yet again. The objective here is, as always, to keep our bodywork therapies extraordinary. With these maps we now create a stronger base for co-designing bodywork treatments with you. They also help us guide our conversations more effectively toward the non-physical factors that contributed to the manifestation of your concerns. Overall, we believe that our new postural assessment maps will help us in making the actual effects of our bodywork more tangible than ever before which, if so, will almost certainly accelerate your journey toward therapeutic recovery.