The Skill of Standing

No one ever taught me how to stand properly. How about you? Between sitting and standing, I’d say we spend the majority of our waking hours in either of these two positions. So how aware are you of your standing position? How well did you consciously train your standing position to work for you instead of against you? Standing is a skill. Yup. When done properly, standing can be used to enhance your ability to be in good biomechanical positions during all types of fitness activity.

Stand with your feet square, hip width apart, hands at your sides. No grow as tall as you can out of the top of your head without lifting your chin. Flex your pelvic floor muscles, your transverse abdominus, and use your lats to pull your shoulders back and down, and then flex your armpit to rotate your shoulder blades upward without lifting your arms. Keep your chin down and your head back and tall. Hold and breathe for 10 minutes a day. What do you notice? How sturdy does that feel? What happens to your breathing in this position? Do your knees lock with almost no effort? How difficult is it to hold this position for extended periods of time?

Keep working on it.

To no one’s surprise, the skill of standing is actually a position in yoga called Mountain Pose. Of course yoga did it first! The secret here is that you’re consciously maximizing your body’s biomechanics to make a good solid position while standing. Performing this solid position while standing still makes it much easier to be able to feel this sturdy position in movement. Today, let’s take the “skill of standing” into as many movements as possible.

The Squat:

Stand tall again. Take a few moments to get into the skill of standing and get really sturdy. Now squat as low as you can and hold. But don’t squat the same way you’ve always squatted in the past, today, use the “skill of standing” inside your squat position. Go. Whoa! Right? Feel your body in this position and see what it’s saying to you. Are your hips activating more? Is your pelvic floor causing your rear end to engage fully? Does your position feel sturdier? How upright is your body? How difficult is it to hold this position for extended periods of time?

Standing well coordinates the locking mechanisms through the entire spine that help support good movement mechanics of all sorts. Therefore when you obtain a good standing skill you can take that skill into any movement you want and glimpse the reservoir of strength, balance, coordination, agility, power, and speed that’s still waiting for you at high intensity. The better your biomechanics are the better your growth in all 15 fitness domains. If you aren’t standing well then without a doubt, 100% guaranteed across the board you are not moving well either.

The Deadlift:

Stand tall again. Hold a PVC pipe or lightly weighted bar with a close grip while using the “skill of standing.” Continue to hold your bodily activation found during your standing posture, and slowly lower yourself down to the bottom of a deadlift position and hold. If you’re using a weighted bar, keep it off the ground. What do you notice? How tight is your position? Do you have more command of the weight in this tight position than you did in your previous technique? What happens to your breathing? How difficult is it to hold this position for extended periods of time?

When you’re not lifting weights, being conscious of what biomechanical positions you’re in and what they’re teaching your body is paramount! How you move inside the gym is how you move outside the gym, and vice versa! If you spend 15 of your waking hours with a hunched spine, internally rotated shoulders that droop down and forward, posteriorly rotated pelvic, disengaged pelvic floor, soggy core and internally rotated femurs, feets and collapsed arches how well are you going to perform inside the gym when you arrive to bust out your workout? That’s like not changing your car oil for 10,000 miles, running low on all fluids, having no air in the tires, leaving the e-brake on, and then loading the vehicle down with furniture and trying to race the Daytona 500. You’re going to blow something out because you aren’t moving smart.

Like all positions we find ourselves in, you have to consistently be mindful of how you’re using your muscles to create optimum positions. Your body CAN find stability and performance in bad positions but at the expense of the bones, joints and soft tissue surrounding them. It’s up to you to learn and cultivate good positions so that everything in your body can function well. You have to train hard to keep your body in good positions. Whenever you allow your muscles to relax, chances are you’re working yourself into a bad position. Being mindful of what muscles are activating, how they’re activating and in what positions they’re in requires your attention and your awareness. Your body is here to be an outlet for your attention and a cultivator of your awareness. It’s not a curse, it’s you! There is no separation between mind and body! The more aware you are of ever subtler things going on inside yourself like blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate, breathing rate, joint angles, nerve energy, ocular twitch, etc… the more aware you are of yourself. The more precise all of your skills and techniques will become. The healthier you will be.