About Plumbline Posture

## What this site is Plumbline Posture is a measurement reference. Every page on it answers one narrow question: given a stance, a landmark and a vertical reference, what reading do you write down — and at what value does that reading stop being ordinary? That is a smaller job than it sounds. Most posture material on the web skips the measurement entirely and goes straight to the correction: stretch this, strengthen that, hold for thirty seconds. The problem is that without a number you have no way to know whether the correction applies to you, whether it is working, or whether you are chasing a shape that was never a problem in the first place. So this site publishes the part that comes before all of that. A screen here is a procedure you run on yourself in about two minutes with things already in the room: a wall, a doorway, a phone on a tripod, a tape measure, a piece of chalk. ## What a record contains Every screen is one record, and every record has the same five parts, in the same order: 1. **A test protocol.** Where to stand, what to wear, how far the camera goes, which way it faces, how long to hold the position, and which two or three landmarks get marked. 2. **A parametric figure.** Two views of the same body — lateral and frontal — drawn to scale, with the plumb line, the landmark points and, if the record measures an angle, that angle marked. The figures are generated as vector files at build time, so they stay sharp on any screen and print cleanly. 3. **A three-grade readout.** Within range, borderline, deviated. Each grade has a numeric boundary and a plain-language description of what the reading looks like at that boundary. The grades do not have names that flatter or alarm; they are labels for ranges. 4. **A causal chain.** Three to five links from a habitual position, through the compensation it forces, to the symptom that usually brings someone to look in the first place. The compensation link points at the deviation page it belongs to; the symptom link points at the screen that measures it. 5. **A referral threshold.** The point past which the reading is no longer a posture finding. That line is stated explicitly on every record, and it is the one part of the page that is not about measurement at all. Fields that do not fit those five are not used. There is no difficulty rating, no estimated time to "fix", no progress tracker. ## The two axes Records sit on two axes, and both are browsable. **Stations** are regions of the body: head and neck, shoulder girdle, pelvis, knee, ankle and foot. A station page collects every screen that reads a landmark inside that region and states what the region can and cannot tell you. **Offsets** are deviation types: forward head, rounded shoulders, anterior and posterior pelvic tilt, knee hyperextension, overpronation. An offset page carries the three-grade threshold table that every screen belonging to it is judged against, plus the conditions that commonly appear alongside it. A single record always belongs to exactly one station and exactly one offset. The station tells you where to put your hands; the offset tells you how to read what you find. ## What is deliberately absent - **No exercise prescriptions.** Not because movement is useless, but because a prescription without an assessment is a guess, and this site does not publish guesses. - **No diagnosis.** Labels like "text neck" and "upper crossed syndrome" describe a pattern of readings, not a condition, and they are not used as if they were one. - **No timelines.** "Correct your posture in six weeks" is a claim about a person this site has never measured. - **No before-and-after imagery.** A photograph of one person's back says nothing about the thresholds that apply to yours. - **No tracking of your answers.** The triage on the home page runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you select is sent anywhere, and there is no form to submit. ## How records are written and reviewed Each record is authored in both English and Simplified Chinese as a single pair, not as a translation pass afterwards. The two versions state the same protocol, the same numbers and the same thresholds; where a term has no settled Chinese equivalent, the English term is kept alongside it rather than replaced with an approximation. Every record carries a review date separate from its publication date. The review date is the last time the thresholds and the protocol were checked against the clinical and measurement literature. When a threshold changes, the review date changes with it. The site publishes on a schedule rather than all at once. Records appear in a deliberate order so that each station and each deviation type fills in progressively, and the triage table on the home page always reflects what is actually published rather than what is planned. ## Corrections If a threshold on this site is wrong, or a protocol is ambiguous enough that two careful people would measure different numbers, the correction is worth making and this site wants to hear about it. Write to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) with the record's title and the specific reading you disagree with. A disagreement about the right threshold is useful; it is how the numbers stay honest. ## Contact [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) reaches the people who maintain this site.