Deportment | PinkFemme

The ability to maintain poise and elegance while sitting is so much more than simply knowing which leg crosses over which when seated. How to sit with poise and elegance, like a lady? In order to be able to sit with poise and elegance, like a lady means maintaining good posture at all times. Sit up straight, toward the edge of your seat with shoulders pressed back and down. The only way you can have poise for an extended period of time while sitting is with good posture. If you slump or slouch in your chair you will not look elegant. Let’s look at how you can do that in greater detail. Start With Good Posture Before You Sit It is near impossible to sit with good posture if you slouch while you are still standing prior to taking your seat. The posture you have while standing transfers to your seated posture. Before you begin sitting down make sure that you are standing tall with your shoulders pressed back and down. My Pilates teacher refers to it as pressing your shoulders away from your ears. To get a feel for this, do a couple of backward shoulder rolls. Approach The Chair At An Angle If you approach your chair straight on, you will need to pivot a full 180 degrees before sitting down. This could cause you to lose your balance in an ungraceful way, especially if the floor or ground underfoot is too uneven for the shoes you are wearing. A better idea is to approach your chair at an angle. It means that you will not need to pivot as much before you are correctly positioned to sit down. It is also easier to place a hand on the armrest of the chair to help maintain balance in your heels as you start to pivot. Feel The Chair Behind your Legs Before Sitting When you can feel the chair against the back of your legs you will know that your feet are just the right distance from the chair to be able to sit gracefully without needing to adjust your pose very much at all. Shifting around in your chair once you have sat down can easily cause your skirt to ride up your legs. If you can feel the chair against your legs there is no need to turn and look at the chair while sitting down. Slide A Foot Back To Maintain Balance While Sitting The best way to maintain balance and good posture as you are sitting down is by sliding one foot back to be slightly under the chair. This will allow you to keep your back straight as you sit and not lean your upper body forward to counterbalance yourself as you sit back onto the chair. Sit Slowly And Gently Holding Your Weight With Your Leg Muscles Flopping back into a chair is anything but elegant. You will have no idea where your skirts will be flying. What you ought to be doing is holding your weight with your leg muscles and lower yourself into your chair. This will take a little practice to get right. If need be, place a hand on the armrest of the chair to maintain your balance. By lowering yourself carefully into your seat, you will notice that you are sitting nearer the edge of the seat as opposed to deep against the backrest. This is the correct position on your chair for elegant social interactions. Remember To Smooth Your Skirt While Sitting When you are able to lower yourself into your chair using the strength in your leg muscles it means that your hands will be free to properly smooth your skirt under your legs as you sit. Doing so is vital to stop your skirt from riding up the back of your legs while you sit. This important, not only from the perspective of protecting your modesty but also preventing your skirt from getting crumpled under you while seated. Getting up from your chair and walking around with the back of your skirt all crumpled looks anything but neat and elegant. Once Seated Maintain Upright Posture With Hands On Your Lap The elegant, upright posture you had while standing, with your shoulders back and down is the same posture to maintain while seated. Place your hands on your lap. This prevents any stray draft or breeze from lifting the front of your skirt. It is also a more “open” position in terms of body language and invites conversation than sitting with your arms folded. What I have also noticed from sitting with my hands in my lap is that it tends to block inappropriate lines of conversation from starting. That suits me fine as I have no need for crude conversations in social situations. If you have a small clutch purse, it is perfectly acceptable to have that on your lap with your hands placed on top of it. Bring Your Feet Together And Cross Legs If Appropriate Once seated with your hands placed on your lap, ensure that you keep your legs together. This means thighs, knees, and ankles. The basic starting position will be where your feet are flat on the ground in front of you. This is classic elegance as used by the Queen. If appropriate in the social situation where you are, you may wish to sit using a Duchess slant or to cross your legs in the correct manner. To learn more about how to cross your legs in the correct manner, here is the article that I wrote that details exactly how to do that. Never Slouch Onto The Backrest Of The Chair Maintaining good posture is the cornerstone of looking elegant. It is impossible to maintain good posture when you slouch down onto the backrest of your chair, so just don’t do it. If you are in the habit of slouching while you sit, then now is the time to correct that before it begins to impact your ability to stand straight and tall. Bring A Foot Under The Chair And Use Leg Muscles To Stand When it comes to standing up from a chair, bring one foot slightly back so that you can use your leg muscles to stand straight up. Take care that you don’t bring your foot too far back or else your leg may hook the underside of the chair and tip it over. Things That Ruin Your Posture While Sitting The types of activities that ruin your posture while sitting are those that involve bringing your shoulders forward or up. The biggest culprit of these is looking down at your phone and scrolling. This tends to make you sit hunched over forward. Another culprit is typing on a keyboard that is too low or reading a book on your lap. If you do any of these activities you need to remain constantly vigilant of your posture to ensure that you don’t start to hunch forward or slouch back for that matter. Exercises You Can Do To Improve Posture When it comes to exercises, just about every woman I speak to seems only focused on building their glutes for a big, firm booty. I won’t deny that working your glutes will help you look good in a pair of skinny jeans or a tight dress, however, they will do nothing for your posture. When it comes to posture, the muscles you ought to be exercising are the rhomboids. The best way I can think of to describe to you how to find them is to picture your rhomboids as the muscles that you would use to pull your shoulder blades towards each other behind your back. Your rhomboids hold your shoulders back and down and keep your back straight. In other words, they are exactly what you need for good posture. Shoulder Blade Squeeze The easiest rhomboid exercise that you can do is the shoulder blade squeeze. In fact, you can try it right now as you sit there reading this. Begin the shoulder blade squeeze exercise standing or sitting with your back straight. Your chin should be tucked in slightly and your shoulders should be back slightly. Slowly tighten your rhomboids by squeezing your shoulder blades together as hard and far as possible provided the exercise is pain-free. https://youtu.be/ouRhQE2iOI8?t=5 What I do is hold my arms at 90 degrees and imagine that I am pulling my elbows toward each other behind my back. Hold for 5 seconds and repeat 10 times. Wall Slides Wall slides are a fantastic exercise for the rhomboids. Once you try them you’ll notice that they’re also a lot more challenging than they look. Start by standing with your back to a wall (make sure there aren’t any pictures or objects hanging on it that you could accidentally knock over). Walk your feet out about six inches from the wall and then lean back against it. Pull your chin back (think of making a double chin), so the back of your head touches the wall, and engage your abs to press your lower back into the wall as well. While keeping your back and head flush with the wall, raise your arms out to the sides so they form approximately 90-degree angles — the backs of your forearms and backs of your hands should touch the wall. https://youtu.be/Apk-frSspcU From here, slowly slide the arms along the wall to raise them up over your head. Don’t let your elbows forearms or hands separate from the wall. Once you reach the top and bring your hands together to touch, slide them back down. If at first, you can’t make it to the top of the wall slide, go as far as you can and progress from there. Do this 10 times.