Deteriorating Posture (slumping head and shoulders):  It doesn’t feel good.  It doesn’t look good. Left on its own, it just continues to deteriorate.  And, with the advanced chiropractic protocols of the Pettibon System, it‘s so easy to do something about it!  Did you ever notice that if you tell someone to “sit up straight,” that they can do it for only about 10 to 20 seconds?  This is because the postural muscles are not under our conscious control.  There are an array of complicated postural reflexes that involve our eyes, ears and pressure sensors throughout our body that interface with the brain to always be toning and relaxing groups of muscles that hold us together and up against gravity.  Until we set up new feedback loops between the brain and our postural muscles, they will continue to default back to the same weakened posture.  And since as we age, we don’ t tend to get stronger and stronger, and since gravity is not going away, we must balance and strengthen our postural muscles with isometric exercises (not the typical kind of gym strengthening exercises to which we are accustomed).  Postural muscles respond only to isometric exercise.  This is the essence of what we do for our patients to reverse deteriorating posture.  Since it’s certainly not “one size fits all,” the magic is to figure out each patient as an individual and find the correct combination of weights and exercises to set up new neuromuscular patterns between the cerebellum (brain) and the body’s postural muscles, thereby restoring great posture.