Michelle Owen teaches clients to treat the cause not the symptoms when it comes to structural correction.
With 30 years’ experience under her belt, it’s no surprise that Michelle Owen is at the top of her game. Michelle has spent decades travelling and learning all around the world from top experts and blended many styles together to form her own unique style, which brings her to where she is today working as a postural specialist. A leader in her field, Michelle’s powerful, proven methods have helped many people who have come to the end of their tether after trying almost everything to get relief from their niggles, pains and reoccurring injuries. Michelle runs her own practice called Posture Fit and has employed and grown a specialised team. Posture Fit is a business dedicated to helping people with long-term postural issues right through to performance for athletes. We had a chat with Michelle and learned more about her successful business.
What does your work at Posture fit entail?
As postural specialists, we start with a postural and orthopaedic assessment. This includes looking at the body on the postural grid then measuring up the whole body to find muscle imbalances, myofascial distortions and holding and movement patterns. From the assessment, we then teach very skilled exercises which help to correct the imbalance in the body. All of the tissue can get distorted and stuck together so we start by normalising and levelling the pelvis through myofascial stretching, re-educating spinal curves, strengthening the internal system and bringing the posture back to the gravity line or neutral. This is where all joints, spine, organs, nervous system and fascia are at an optimal position.
What are some of the common reasons that bring clients into your practice?
Often clients have been in some discomfort, whether that be from years of postural issues, accidents, disc herniations, neck and back pain or re-occurring injuries. So they have had niggles or pain at varying levels for a long time and they have tried many things. They have come in after having tried cortisone injections, have been told they need surgery and they have tried other exercise forms with some relief but not enough. A lot of them have only tried things singularly, for example going to the chiropractor or osteopath without correcting muscle/tissue imbalance or movement patterns, so I try to help them understand that their body is like building a house – when you are building a house you need a team to work together. On the other end of the scale, we have a lot of intelligent people come and work with us as they understand setting up their structure for the long term so they don’t get old and buckled before their time. Most of my clients are athletic people, they love their sport of choice. Everyone has some sort of muscle imbalance in their body, the more active they are the more need there is to make sure the structure is sound to prevent injuries because over time their body starts to wear and that’s when it becomes more prominent.
What does a session with you look like?
The more athletic people are the more need there is to make sure their structure is sound because just like when tyres are wearing on a car its not if they blow, but when they blow, same thing with muscle imbalance that leads to sore back, neck, knees, disc injuries, hip replacements and so on. Most of these things are postural onset unless someone has had a impact injury then it can be a mixture of both. For the coaching, everyone starts on a similar level and they start learning the myofascial stretches and ELDOAs (spinal decompressions – the amazing work of Guy Voyer , a French-Canadian osteopath) to start normalising the fascia. From there we teach very detailed internal stability and re-educate spinal curvature, growing into strength training to hold it all together. How fast they go through the process is varied, some will learn slow and some will learn fast, some will do lots of practice and some not so much, so they will move through the levels according to where they are at. Most of our work is one on one but we offer group classes which focus on the same concepts, we call them Posture Fit group classes. Within those, we have the myofascial and ELDOA classes, postural stability and strength classes with levels ranging from beginner to advanced classes in blocks and we also offer casual classes.
A lot of people are becoming aware that poor posture is a collapse of the whole body and it gets worse with age. It doesn’t have to be this way as we have amazing skills to recorrect and have a pain free and functional future full of fun.
Good posture is one of life’s best kept secrets.
