Conventional wisdom says that if you have bad posture, you should work on it. Make it better. Improve it.

In short, it’s time to go to the mechanic and have your body “fixed.”

But what if fixing your bad posture is just making the problem worse?

What if strengthening those back muscles to pull your rounded shoulders back into place is making your body want to hunch them even more?

What if stretching your quads to correct your lower cross syndrome and silence your grouchy (and highly vocal) back is just increasing the strain on your spine?

That would seem odd. I mean, if the body isn’t lining out, stacking up and working properly, we should take steps toward correcting it, making it better and improving function, right?

I’m all about optimization. I fully believe that life is about making yourself better – not to beat other people, win accolades or rack up a list of impressive achievements, but to learn what you’re really made of.

It’s at our edges that we find out who we are. Not who we pretend to be, but the core you – the unchangeable, limitless person behind all the costumes and charades.

Pitting yourself against a worthy foe develops deep inner character. It’s the classic hero’s journey.

Sometimes (hint: always) that foe is your self – your physical, mental and spiritual beliefs and conditioning, which, when combined, comprise your personal limits.

I’m sure you’ve realized by now that I’m fanatical about the power of the body to change and influence the mind. So, why would I recommend you **not** try to change your less than optimal posture?

To understand my reasoning requires a fundamental shift in philosophy.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the body has been likened to a machine. It’s the most practical model we had for the human structure.

But the body is not a machine, and in today’s shift toward a less mechanical and more conceptual era, the mechanical model is highly outdated.

We’re not machines. We’re systems. And systems are whole, integrated, synergistic and interdependent.

That means that we can’t make a shift on one level of your system without cascading effects happening throughout the whole system.

Additionally, systems have inherent movements that are biologically imperative. That basically means that those movements are just the things that the system does regardless of programming, cultural conditioning or other overlays.

If a fly tickles a horse’s shoulder, the horse will twitch the skin to shake off the fly. It’s not a conscious movement; it’s a reflex inherent to all horses regardless of how they’re bred, where they’re raised, whether they’re wild or domesticated.

Humans have reflexes, too. If you’re frightened, for example, your body will shorten its front line, effectively curling you into a ball to protect the vulnerable soft organs in your belly.

Your chin will tuck and slide forward, guarding your jugular. Your breath shortens and quickens, cuing an adrenaline release to keep you on your toes to flee, or fight if you have to.

But what happens when that reflex gets interrupted? Or stuck halfway?

Your system never completes its expression. It gets frozen mid-way, like that infuriating spinning optical disk that shows up when your computer can’t handle everything you’re asking it to do.

What this means for you is that you’re chronically stuck in fight or flight mode. Your body is trying to curl forward to protect you and you’re fighting it all the way.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade of working with bodies, it’s that fighting the nervous system’s innate response is futile.

No matter how hard you work to get your body where you want it, the nervous system is going to yank you back toward its incomplete expression.

Sometimes you have to go into that expression for your body to be willing to come back out of it. That means that if your shoulders are hunched and your upper back rounded, you might need to go **more** into that position and wait for your body to come back out on its own, coming to neutral without all the struggle and strife.

Instead of yanking those shoulders back, working your back muscles and combating lower cross syndrome with strength training, try something a lot more simple: give your body the slack it needs to release the spasm it’s in.

Whatever pattern you are trying to correct, try feeding into it, pause for several minutes, wait, and feel how your body responds.

This takes patience. It requires awareness. It’s not conventional. But your nervous system will love you for it. It’s trying to help you. It would be so grateful if you would stop declaring war on its efforts.

I’m seeing massive results with this “backwards” approach, but I want to hear about your experience. Try it and tell me what happens in the comments below!

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I didn’t think I was much for video games, until some cruel individual introduced me to Civilization 5. Said individual shall remain unnamed.

Basically, Civ 5 is about world domination. You play a great historical leader from any number of random countries around the world, and you start out at the beginning in 3000 B.C. with a single settler and one warrior <== read: guy with a rock tied to a stick.

Over the next several thousand years, you build your civilization, creating wonders of the world, developing new technology and eventually coming into the modern era with airplanes and, yes, nuclear bombs.

One technology got me thinking – replaceable parts.

We didn’t really have these until the Industrial Revolution, which was all about efficiency. It turned the world from a giant, natural organism into a mechanized system.

And it changed how we saw ourselves.

Before the Industrial Revolution, bodies were largely a mystery. Some rogues had done a few dissections in the name of medical study, so we had names and classifications for our muscles and bones and organs, but the animating forces behind them remained in the realm of mysticism.

While no one has definitive answers about consciousness, we’ve now turned from seeing ourselves as biological wonders to some sort of soft machine with parts that can be taken out, interchanged, replaced and maybe even, in the near future, upgraded.

So when you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror or see a photo from a recent family event, your belly pooched out, shoulders slumped and chin jutting forward like the bow of the Titanic, it’s only natural to think, “I’ve really gotta fix my posture.”

But, there’s a difference between fixing your posture and changing it. Subtle? Maybe. But it’s really important if you actually want results.

When we talk about “fixing” posture, we’re referring to an outside-in approach. We’re talking about strengthening muscles that might be weak, stretching muscles that might be tight, and using tension to hold your body into a rigidly defined ideal shape.

In short, we’re treating our body like a machine to be mastered and, ultimately, subjugated.

You will conform!

But conform to what? Our concept of what constitutes “ideal posture” is subject to question. Ideal for which purpose?

Changing your posture is a much more subtle art. Change happens at a much deeper level. It’s a shift from using extrinsic muscles to hold ourselves into a culturally defined ideal shape to allowing our bodies to use the most efficient movement for the task at hand.

In short, changing your posture happens at the subconscious level. It’s much deeper than a fix, which requires tension and focus to hold it in place. When you’re fixing your posture, it’s only good when you’re thinking about it. As soon as you forget to suck in your belly or pull your shoulders back, you’re slouching again.

Change is like installing a whole new operating system that runs in the background. When it senses discomfort, it runs an optimization scan to see where your body could be more efficient.

It’s about accomplishing more with less effort.

But before you can implement the Change Operating System in your body, you have to run a virus scan and see what’s not working.

This is a pretty simple procedure. It involves paying attention to your current felt sensations and identifying them.

Most people, when asked how they feel physically, will say, “Fine.” Unless they’re in pain. Then they say, “It hurts here,” while pointing to what hurts.

If you ask someone how something feels that doesn’t hurt, you’ll usually hear, “It’s fine, it doesn’t hurt.”

That’s how it doesn’t feel. But what does it feel like?

There are myriad sensations your body can feel (please note that “fine” is not one of them). A joint can feel stiff, sticky, filled with peanut butter. Or it can feel loose, oiled, fluid and open. A muscle can feel stringy, tight, short, tense, restricted or thick. It can also feel light, loose, limber, open, stretchy, bouncy and free.

If you want to start changing your posture, tap into the sensory information your body is sending to your brain in every waking moment. Change – real change, the kind that makes fundamental shifts in who and how you are – starts with awareness, not with doing.

Being precedes doing, every time.

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There are some things you just take for granted, until you no longer have them.  Like being able to turn your head and look over your shoulder before you back your car into that concrete pillar that someone clearly installed while you ran into Target to stock up on toilet paper.

Having a stiff neck really throws a wrench in your day.  You don’t realize how much you turn your head until it hurts every time you try.

But a hundred neck massages won’t fix the problem, which is why your stiff neck keeps coming back.  Because the pain in your neck?  Has nothing to do with your neck.

Rarely is the site of the symptom the site of the problem.  To get to the root of your neck issues, you have to chase the problem, not the pain.

Let’s back up a bit and take a look at where the neck actually begins and ends.  Anatomically speaking, your neck extends from the first cervical vertebra just beneath your skull to the 7th cervical vertebra.  But when you turn your head, these aren’t the only moving parts.

Your cervical spine connects very directly to your thoracic spine (mid-back), which in turn links to your lumbar spine in your lower back.  Your lumbar spine is hooked up to your sacrum – the large triangular shaped bone that wedges into your pelvis.

Drawing lines between different body parts is as artificial as our political borders.  They don’t exist, except as constructs of our minds.

If you keep stretching your neck and the pain keeps returning, it’s because something else is out of balance and it’s contributing to the tightness further up the chain.

My advice?  Look at your hips.  In our modern culture, all of us – ALL of us – sit way more than we should.  We sit to work, sit to drive, sit to eat, even sit to relax.  Some of us even sit to exercise!

Sitting puts our hips into flexion, bringing the knees closer to the chest and contracting the front line of the body.  This isn’t a problem for short durations, but getting stuck in flexion, as so many modern people are, causes dysfunctional spinal movement and, ultimately, neck and shoulder pain.

Now it’s all starting to come together, right?  The body is a system where each piece and part is dependent on every other piece for function and balance.  So, how can you address the restrictions in your hips?

Hips are complicated.  There are myriad muscles crossing over joints and attaching at different points, some deep inside the pelvis.  But the most important thing you can do to restore proper hip function is to treat your flexion addiction.

Hip flexors are the muscles that – you guessed it – flex the hip.  The largest of these are the quadriceps, four large muscles that make up the front of your thigh.

A much deeper and also much more difficult to stretch hip flexor is your psoas, which runs from the front of your spine just behind your solar plexus down to the inside of your leg.  This guy is deep, in more ways that one.

The psoas tends to store a lot of negative emotion, namely fear and anxiety.  When you feel threatened in any way, the tendency is to “go fetal,” or fold yourself up into your belly to protect your sensitive organs.

Even if you don’t get fully into the fetal position, chronic stress and insecurity can create a shortening of the psoas in an approximation of the fetal position.

The psoas is also deeply linked with breathing because the place where it connects to your spine is just below your diaphragm.  So, a tight, restricted psoas will keep your breath shallow, which in turn raises stress levels and increases overall physical tension.

Opening up the front of the hips gives length to your spine, takes pressure off of your neck, allows you to breathe more deeply and ultimately reduces overall tension in your body.  That’s a lot of bang for your stretching buck!

Try this simple dynamic hip flexor stretch to release your quads and psoas, and then leave me a comment and let me know how it goes for you!

Pain Free At Any Age

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