Muscle tone is muscle contraction/tension that we are not consciously aware of. Without muscle tone, our bodies would fall in a heap. My ultimate treatment goal with postural correction is creating your awareness and then using a variety of hands-on techniques to increase tone in the muscles needed to maintain that correction, to decrease tone in muscles that oppose it and then educating you on home exercises. My aim is to help you develop a balanced posture that you don't have to continually think about to maintain.
The above diagram[1] shows some common muscle imbalance patterns and to follow is a brief explanation:Inhibited muscles are often our deep neck flexors (at the front of our neck behind our windpipe) and also our mid back area as the facilitated stronger and larger neck flexor muscles and pectoral muscles at the front of the chest are pulled forward (think about how you sit at a desk or look at your phone with your head down, shoulders forward) and then this all pulls the shoulders forward and upwards so the shoulder muscles are then holding onto our heavy head and are over worked and tight.
In the lower part of the body often our quads (front of thigh) are facilitated and are over active (think about the effect of sitting all day and how this shortens the quads and lengthens the gluts (buttock and hamstrings). And how a weakness in our abdominals and core, causes our lower back to over
compensate, facilitated (think about how we feel our back strain if we lift something incorrectly, loading the back, instead of bending at the hips and knees and using our legs and core to lift). Often, we feel pain and tightness in the hamstrings, is this because they are over-stretched and working hard to compensate for their opposite muscles, the quads, which could be tight and short.
N.B. This is a brief introduction to correct posture, please ask if you would like any more advice on how we can help ourselves sit, walk and run with better posture.