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The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World
 
 
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The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World [Paperback]

Mary Bond (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)

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Book Description

December 10, 2006
A manual for understanding the anatomical and emotional components of posture in order to heal chronic pain

• Contains self-help exercises and ergonomics information to help correct unhealthy movement patterns

• Teaches how to adopt suitable posture in the modern sedentary world

Many people cause their own back and body pain through their everyday bad postural and movement habits. Many sense that their poor posture is probably the root of the problem, but they are unable to change long-standing habits.

In The New Rules of Posture, Mary Bond approaches postural changes from the inside out. She explains that healthy posture comes from a new sense we can learn to feel, not by training our muscles into an ideal shape. Drawing from 35 years of helping people improve their bodies, she shows how habitual movement patterns and emotional factors lead to unhealthy posture. She contends that posture is the physical action we take to orient ourselves in relation to situations, emotions, and people; in order to improve our posture, we need to examine both our physical postural traits and the self-expression that underlies the way we sit, stand, and move. The way we walk, she says, is our body’s signature.

Bond identifies the key anatomical features that impact alignment, particularly in light of our modern sedentary lives, and proposes six zones that help create postural changes: the pelvic floor, the breathing muscles, the abdomen, the hands, the feet, and the head. She offers self-help exercises that enable healthy function in each zone as well as information on basic ergonomics and case histories to inspire us to think about our own habitual movements. This book is a resource for Pilates, yoga, and dance instructors as well as healthcare professionals in educating people about postural self-care so they can relieve chronic pain and enjoy all life activities with greater ease.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Few things are as overlooked and yet absolutely critical to our health and well being as our posture. Mary Bond offers information, stories and tools for learning how to stand and move with ease and elegance.”
(Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D, PT, author of 30 Essential Yoga Poses )

The New Rules of Posture is a good adjunct to bodywork of all kinds, from chiro­practic and osteopathy to Pilates and yoga. Read it thoroughly, let it soak into your experience--your body will thank you.”
(Thomas Myers, author of Anatomy Trains  )

“Mary Bond’s talent and expertise extended my professional dance career until age 52! Anyone who suffers from body dysfunction and pain must read her book. Actually, it should be mandatory reading for all institutions offering anatomy, kinesiology, and medical courses.”
(Bonnie Oda Homsey, Former member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Artistic Director of American Repertory Dance Company )

“I have long searched for a book that addresses the human body as a whole, and with clarity, guidance, and completeness. This book is a multi-faceted gem offering all of that and much more--I highly recommend it to teachers of movement and to anyone eager to learn how to become a better occupant of their body.”
(Marie-José Blom-Lawrence, Pilates Specialist and Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, Department of Dance, Southern California Loyola Marymount University )

“At last, at any level of knowledge of the body and movement, everyone will have the joy of a discovery that can profoundly change our relationship to ourselves, to others and to the beauty of the world.”
(Hubert Godard, Ph.D., Professor of Movement and Research, University of Paris )

"Recommended for anyone interested in the anatomical and emotional aspects of the movement of one’s body."
(Dede Archer, Library Journal, Feb 15, 2007 )

From the Back Cover

HEALTH / EXERCISE

The New Rules of Posture is a good adjunct to bodywork of all kinds, from chiro­practic and osteopathy to Pilates and yoga. Read it thoroughly, let it soak into your experience--your body will thank you.”
--Thomas Myers, author of Anatomy Trains

“Few things are as overlooked and yet absolutely critical to our health and well-being as our posture. Mary Bond offers information, stories, and tools for learning how to stand and move with ease and elegance.”
--Judith Hanson Lasater, Ph.D., PT, author of 30 Essential Yoga Poses

Many people cause their own back and body pain through their everyday bad postural and movement habits. Many sense that their poor posture is probably the root of the problem, but they are unable to change long-standing habits.

In The New Rules of Posture, Mary Bond approaches postural changes from the inside out. She explains that healthy posture comes from a new sense we can learn to feel, not by training our muscles into an ideal shape. Drawing from thirty-five years of helping people improve their bodies, she shows how habitual movement patterns and emotional factors lead to unhealthy posture. She contends that posture is the physical action we take to orient ourselves in relation to situations, emotions, and people; in order to improve our posture, we need to examine both our physical postural traits and the self-expression that underlies the way we sit, stand, and move. The way we walk, she says, is our body’s signature.

Bond identifies the key anatomical features that impact alignment, particularly in light of our modern sedentary lives, and proposes six zones that help create postural changes: the pelvic floor, the breathing muscles, the abdomen, the hands, the feet, and the head. She offers self-help exercises that enable healthy function in each zone as well as information on basic ergonomics and case histories to inspire us to think about our own habitual movements. This book also is a resource for Pilates, yoga, and dance instructors as well as healthcare professionals in educating people about postural self-care so they can relieve chronic pain and enjoy all life activities with greater ease.

MARY BOND has a Master’s degree in dance from UCLA and trained with Dr. Ida P. Rolf as a Structural Integration practitioner. She is a movement instructor at the Rolf Institute and teaches movement workshops nationally. The author of Balancing Your Body, she has also published articles in numerous health and fitness magazines. She lives in California.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Healing Arts Press (December 10, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594771243
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594771248
  • Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,450 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I've been a student of the human body since I donned my first dancing shoes at age six. After receiving an MA degree in Dance from UCLA, I was privileged to study with Ida Rolf, originator of a type of body therapy known as Structural Integration. I'm proud to have been certified as a Structural Integration practitioner by Dr. Rolf herself.

Rolf's understanding of the body went beyond anything I'd learned during many years of movement training. She taught that gravity organizes human structures and that people can achieve an optimal relationship with this determining force through bodywork and education.

The New Rules of Posture presents new developments in movement education. It evolved out of my wish to share the legacy of Ida Rolf with the general public. While this legacy includes the understanding of posture and movement, it also has philosophical implications. The deeper message is that the way we inhabit our bodies affects the ways in which we perceive the world and behave toward one another.

Currently Chair of the Movement Integration® Faculty of The Rolf Institute in Boulder, CO, I also teach workshops tailored to the needs and interests of various groups such as runners, dancers, yoga practitioners and massage therapists.

 

Customer Reviews

33 Reviews
5 star:
 (29)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (33 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Tool for Every Body, June 26, 2008
This review is from: The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World (Paperback)
The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move by Mary Bond is a must read if you're interested in increasing your somatic awareness of your body in motion. Hoorah! finally someone writes about the body as a moving entity and not as a stable unit moving just one joint at a time. Posture for Bond is not about standing still and sticking your chest out, but about how you move is number one of the new rules. Bond writes, "your posture is the product of the ongoing perceptual activities through which you orient yourself to your world."
Bond's goal is to make readers more aware of opening the body up to the world. The entire book focuses on the action of walking to gain an understanding of what Bond calls open stabilization and open orientation. These terms of Bond's encourage movement without unnecessarily tensing muscles in the body that over time develops fascial adhesions and ultimately leads to restricted movement and decreased range of motion. Fascial adhesions where two or more fascia stick together can occur in a variety of locations because fascia, the connective tissue in the body, is everywhere. In fact Bond writes that if everything in our bodies were taken away fascia would maintain a recognizable human form.
Things can get pretty complicated when posture is theorized as dynamic, but Bond is clear and precise. She divides her book into four sections: awareness, stability, orientation, and motion. Each section builds on the next. Threaded through each section are Bond's six zones of the body: breathing muscles, abdomen, pelvic floor, hands, feet and head. Bond states that all six regions are connected anatomically and unnecessary tension in any one of them causes a reaction in all of them.
To help guide the reader to change bodily habits, Bond uses explorations throughout the book. For example she writes, "stand comfortably as though you are waiting in line for movie tickets. Then take a step forward toward the ticket window. Notice which leg took the step." In this exploration entitled, "your best foot" Bond's point is that because the spine accommodates the habits you have with your legs, if you have a strong preference for one leg over the other it could cause misalignment all the way up to your jaw.
Throughout the book are fascinating facts and relationships in the body that if nothing else will help you to reconceive of your bodily connections. For example, Bond writes losing too much carbon dioxide by breathing too quickly can cause everything from depression to low back pain; she cautions against tightening the sacrum because it prevents your feet from meeting the ground successfully; and ,warns against performing the same movement over and over again. Why? Because repetition without staying aware of bodily signals diminishes our consciousness. All in all The New Rules of Posture enhances our consciousness and is a book to go back to again and again each time with a deeper understanding of the moving body.
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60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Body awareness to the max!!!!!!, September 6, 2007
This review is from: The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World (Paperback)
OH MY GOSH!!!! This book has answered so many questions for me. When I was growing up, my Mom always told me to stand up straight. Try as I might, I never was able to. Once I got older, I was told by doctors that I had a pelvis that tilted back (I know, too much information). What they didn't tell me was I could change the tilt!!!!! For the first time in my life, I can now stand up straight and have the proper curve in my back!!! The book has helped me with several other aspects that I wasn't aware of...how when you walk you're actually supposed to be pushing off with the toes of the foot that is in back (it makes walking easier, I was a heel walker). I'm only on Ch 4 (breathing) but I feel this book is worth it's weight in gold!!!!!
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47 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Vague and unhelpful, August 31, 2009
This review is from: The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand, and Move in the Modern World (Paperback)
I don't know how or why so many people have given this book a high rating. It has elaborate descriptions of exercises to do, but without photos, the descriptions are pretty useless. Trying to do the exercises based on the descriptions is sometimes okay but usually ridiculous. The description of the "Seated Sphinx" is impossible to follow, for example: based on this book's description, I have no idea what the exercise ought to look like or how to do it. For many of the exercises, the instructions are less about precisely what you're supposed to do than about how you ought to feel as you do the exercise, but the descriptions of how you ought to feel are often vague. And though often vague, the descriptions are incredibly long (often several pages), a fact that makes the described exercises hard to do (because how can you keep all that info in your head as you try to do the exercise?). For many exercises, you're supposed to be able to do the exercise just by "visualizing" it?!? But given that there aren't many illustrations in the book, I can't visualize anything (and I'm not sure that I believe that just visualizing something is going to make my body do it right automatically). Maybe these exercises work if you have a person who is giving you face-to-face, individual instruction as you do them, but reading from a book with hardly any photos doesn't work very well. A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, an entire book. There are a lot more helpful books out there with great descriptions and photos of exercises that really make a tremendous difference for your posture if you just do the exercise as instructed and shown (not with all sorts of pressure to feel the right sensations to get the exercise right). I recommend Anthony B. Carey's Pain-Free Program or Paul D'Arezzo's Posture Alignment or Janice Novak's Posture, Get It Straight! or even Perry Bonomo and Daniel Seidler's Why Does Working @ My Computer Hurt So Much? They're much, much, much, much better books than this one.
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