Posture

As a toddler learning to walk, my brother held one arm overhead, clasped in the hand of my mother or my father. Like training wheels, holding the hand of an adult provided additional stability while he learned his own balance and coordination.

But later, long after he could walk on his own, my brother continued to hold that arm overhead because that was how he did it when he was learning. The “training wheels” of an adult had shaped his movement until his body believed that walking meant holding an arm up.

This is probably not a unique story. We all learn adaptive movement patterns as children, but later abandon them because they’re no longer useful.

I’m happy to report at as a forty-something adult, my brother no longer walks with his arm held up overhead. Can you imagine a grown person walking around the city holding one hand in the air like a toddler waiting for an adult to grab hold? Silliness.

While this movement pattern is pretty obviously not useful over the long term, we all learn more subtle maladaptive patterns throughout our lives and then hang onto them out of habit. We don’t notice the friction they put on our bodies because the low-grade discomfort fades over time into background noise.

Standing is often thought of as a box you check when you’re a toddler. Yes, she’s standing. Now she’s walking. Done and done. You don’t need to relearn or revisit those skills.

But my brother’s story illustrates the fact that just because you stand doesn’t mean you stand optimally. Just because that toddler was walking doesn’t mean he could walk for the rest of his life with his arm in the air.

And just like that toddler, you may have adopted some patterns that aren’t really serving your healthy posture and movement.

The ways in which we stand and move are patterned in many layers. Humans imitate the people around us¹—and this is an efficient way to learn. But just because it shortcuts the learning curve doesn’t mean that we all learn to move in optimal ways. Everyone has a history of accidents, injuries and habitual patterns that influence their posture and movement, and when we imitate those around us, we also take on their history.

So, let’s take a look at what neutral alignment looks like in standing, and you can check yourself against the metrics to see how you stack up—pun intended.

What Not to Do

Before we dive into healthy alignment, let’s knock a few common misconceptions out of your head. I’m sure you realize by now that what you call “posture” is a multi-faceted expression combining both stance and movement, but it’s still important to make sure we’re on the same page before we delve into what constitutes healthy alignment.

Brace

Optimal alignment should feel easy. You don’t have to “set” your body in place and then nanny it with your attention to keep it there. Neutral alignment is a point of equilibrium in which you have the least amount of physical tension possible, not the most.

You don’t have to grip, force, or control your body, and being in neutral alignment is often accompanied by a feeling of lightness as your tension melts away. Neutral alignment is about letting go of as much tension as possible and still remaining upright.

Tense Shoulders

People: you really don’t have to hold your shoulders in place. Need I say it again? While generally bracing and tensing your body are practices that run counter to neutral alignment, I just have to call out shoulder tension in particular.

Shoulders that are back and down are a typical metric used to measure good posture. A whole pile of things could be structurally imperfect in a person’s body, but if their shoulders are back, they’re standing up straight by conventional standards.

And yet, your shoulders shouldn’t be tense. By pulling them back, setting them “in place” and holding them there despite their desire to roll forward, you’re inhibiting their true function, which is movement.

The shoulder joint is designed for mobility. In fact, your entire shoulder girdle, which is made up of your scapula, clavicle, and humerus, or upper arm bone, only has one single bony connection to the rest of your body, and that’s where your collar bone joins your sternum.

The rest of your shoulder bones just sort of hang in this hammock of muscle tissue. The shoulder joint itself, where your arm bone meets your scapula, is a very shallow ball and socket. In short, your shoulder is meant for movement.

When you pull those shoulders back and tighten them up, you’re bridling them and preventing mobility. Additionally, because shoulders rest on the rib cage, it’s rarely the actual shoulder that’s to blame for that dreaded forward roll.

In fact, pelvic misalignments and a sunken chest have much more impact on shoulder alignment than anything actually in your shoulder girdle. So please, do your poor exhausted shoulders a favor and release your death grip on their position.

Tuck Pelvis

At some point in their lives, nearly every single one of my clients has been told by a very well-meaning yoga teacher or Pilates instructor or other fitness-based coach that their pelvis is tipped forward and needs to be corrected.

Sometimes the correction is even more general, merely addressed to a room full of students—some vague instruction to tuck the tailbone and engage abdominals.

I get the good intention behind this cue. A lot of people in our culture have hip problems — overly tight quad and hip flexor muscles that pull their pelvis into an anterior rotation. This results in a “swayback” appearance to the lumbar spine.

While this may be true, tucking your tail and holding it there is not a beneficial correction even if a person does exhibit this pattern. But it’s especially not beneficial if you don’t even have an anteriorly tipped pelvis to begin with. Many people have a posterior pelvis — with an overly straight lumbar spine — as their postural baseline. Telling these folks to tuck their tails is extremely counterproductive as they’re already too far in this direction.

But even if you aren’t one of those posterior pelvis people, tucking your pelvis under and holding it there falls under the category of bracing. It requires muscular effort and mental control to sustain. Not only that, but those tight muscles used to hold that wayward pelvis in place now can’t perform their biological function—movement.

It’s far more useful to release the tight muscles that restrict that pelvis in the first place.

It’s also worth mentioning that what we consider as proper pelvic alignment based on anatomical charts might not actually be ideal for a living, breathing, moving body. Anatomy drawings are done from cadavers—that means dead people—lying on metal slabs. The funny thing about a body that has no animating force being placed horizontally on a solid surface is that it will tend to flatten out due to the forces of gravity.

Christine Kent, RN, author of Saving the Whole Woman: Natural Alternatives to Surgery for Pelvic Organ Prolapse and Urinary Incontinence, says that women have three wedge-shaped vertebrae in their lumbar spines, while men have two². These “wedged” vertebrae comprise the curvature of your lumbar spine. The more wedge-shaped your vertebrae are, the more your pelvis will have a slight anterior tilt, which Kent says is actually the anatomically correct position.

So stop tucking your tail, y’all.

Clench Abs

Along with tucking your tail, clenching your abs does nothing to encourage proper alignment, despite the preponderance of oft-repeated internet advice to “brace your abs.”

In fact, your core muscles are involved in the transfer of movement from the lower extremity to the upper — not to mention their importance in breathing. Abdominals and deep core muscles like your psoas allow the impact of your foot hitting the ground to travel through your body, up your spine, and out the top of your head.

If you clench your abdominal muscles in an effort to shore up your spine or correct an imbalanced pelvis, you’re blocking that flow of movement and creating a barrier against which the impact will crash, like an ocean wave.

Often, I hear from clients that they were “fine” all their lives until one day they weren’t. They can’t pinpoint what happened, and usually they shrug it off as getting older. These subtle but insidious patterns of tension are often to blame for joint degradation over time because they eliminate the literal spring from your step and the resulting force of thousands of steps over years of life causes abrasion to soft tissue and joints.

Core Strength vs. Core Integrity

I’m starting to believe that core strength training is a religion. So many of my clients seem convinced that rock-hard abdominals are the answer to all their postural ills.

Core strength will fix everything! It will cure your back pain and allow you to lift ten million pounds! Okay, so it’s not that dramatic. But whenever I notice clients with vastly different structures all claiming the exact same prescription to fix their postural ills, I become extremely skeptical.

These core strength devotees are the people who exhibit the least amount of movement through their center, as though their midsection had been cryogenically frozen in place, allowing no sympathetic contraction of the rectus abdominis, obliques, or psoas muscle.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Core strength is an important element to a healthy structure. It’s just that my definition of core strength and the fitness industry’s probably aren’t on the same page, or even in the same book for that matter.

That’s why I prefer to use the term core integrity. Why? Because words matter. A lot.

When you mention core strength to someone, they immediately clench their abs. Remember how we talked about bracing not being useful to neutral alignment? Well, that’s bracing.

If your abs are so clenched that they can’t move, they also can’t absorb shock, and your body takes a lot of shock. Every time your foot hits the ground, a shockwave goes through your entire body.

Bracing, whether in your abs, your shoulders, quads, wherever, creates rigidity over time. Rigidity equals brittleness, and brittle structures break down. We don’t want you to be brittle. We want you to be resilient, to spring back. This is how you keep your tissues healthy and functional for life—not by bracing, but by relaxing.

Christine Kent writes that a focus on toning the abdominal wall is a relatively new practice in modern fitness, first developing prominence around the 1930s. She theorizes that this type of exercise has detrimental effects on internal organs in both women and men².

Over-exercised abdominals put a burden on your psoas, a deep core muscle that runs from your spine across the front of your hip, attaching high up on the inside of your femur (thigh bone).

Your enteric nervous system, or “gut brain,” runs through your psoas muscle. Rigidity in this delicate core muscle can impinge these nerves which slows digestion and triggers a stress response in your body. All of this ultimately results in yet more tension—exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

What to Do

It’s really easy to tell you not to do everything you’ve ever been taught equates to good posture. But if I take all that away, then what’s left for you to do to encourage this evasive neutral alignment of which I speak?

Fear not, for I shall tell you. The following principles will help you to stand taller with more ease. And the side benefit is loose, limber movement. How can you beat that?

Stack Your Blocks

In the work that I do, we’re trained to use many different models for “seeing” the body, for assessing and understanding how different aspects of your structure relate to one another and work together. With regard to alignment, the most prevalent model is to look at the body as a series of “blocks,” or segments that stack on top of each other.

You can look at your body in this way from the front and back, or from the side. “Blocks” can shift sideways—a hip jutted out to the left, a rib cage shifted right—or forward and backward.

The more misaligned your “blocks” become, the more drag there is on your body from gravity³. When gravity runs through a well-stacked body, it gives you the sense of an elongating force lifting your chest and shoulders rather than a compressive one which drags you down. Many of my clients report a feeling of lightness after working with me and restoring this “stacked” alignment; that’s due to the release of excess muscular tension. You’re no longer pulling against gravity to hold yourself up, and therefore less effort is required.

Stacking your blocks must be done progressively from the ground up, however, if you wish to reap its benefits on your posture. Often when people work to pull their rounded shoulders back, the reason this position isn’t sustainable is because the lower “blocks” of the body are still misaligned and therefore there’s no support for your shoulders from below.

Practice

Use the following practice to give your body an experience of neutral alignment. You’ll notice that cues given are tend to be less “do this” or “stand this way” and more “feel this, explore your experience of that.”

You might love this approach, or find it frustrating and annoying. Whatever your personal preference, please know that there’s a solid reason I approach posture and movement in this way.

Telling you to “do” something doesn’t give your body the opportunity to dissolve a less efficient pattern in favor of something more useful. It overlays a new neural pattern of mental control, and thus excess tension, over the top of your old one, kind of like throwing a sheet over a pile of junk in the corner of the room and pretending it’s not there anymore.

You could also think of it in terms of software. Your body is running one program, but it has a few bugs. We could open up a new program, and run that one alongside the original, but it would bog down your computer’s memory and slow processing speed. It’s better to close out of the first program before opening a second.

Cueing you to experience your body rather than override it provides sensory data to your brain which closes out those buggy programs and creates a clean operating system for new ones to arise.

Finding Neutral Alignment

1. Stand comfortably with bare feet on a firm surface. Place your feet under your hip joints, not narrower or wider. To locate your hip joints, place your fist next to your pubic bone or groin. Your hip joint will be roughly below your pinky finger (often narrower than you would suspect).

2. Imagine your feet extending downward into the ground. You can visualize growing roots deep into the earth or your feet slowly melting into warm wax. As you do this, notice how sinking into your feet creates a sense of upward lift through your legs, hips, maybe even your spine.

3. Allow your pelvis to shift so that it’s balanced over the arches of your feet, moving it forward and backward until you find the center. Gently think of opening the front crease of your hip joint like a door hinge swinging to its widest setting. This creates space for the pelvis to move over your feet.

Notice how your spine elongates when your feet and pelvis support it fully from below.

4. To bring your shoulders over your pelvis, place one hand on your sternum and the other about two inches below your belly button. Float your sternum up and forward until the hand on your sternum is slightly in front of the hand on your abdomen. Relax your arms and shoulders, letting them hang naturally.

5. Finally, let the back of your head drift backward until your ear is over your shoulder. Resist the urge to tip your chin up or tuck it; instead, think of the base of your skull being drawn toward the back, like a drawer sliding out.

Congratulations, you’ve completed the first step in helping your body find neutral alignment. If this position feels somewhat awkward, that’s normal. We’re giving your body a new experience of alignment, and that’s going to feel a little unfamiliar at first.

The next practice will help you get comfortable in this new, more stacked position.

Finding Your Center

Once you’ve found a place of relatively neutral alignment, the next step is to become centered in gravity.

When you stand, you probably just stand. You most likely don’t think much about how your weight is distributed from foot to foot, whether you stand more on your toes or your heels, whether you have a tendency to be “behind the vertical”—leaning slightly back.

All of this is simply normal for you; it’s just standing. In order to help your body to exist more consistently in a place of neutral alignment as opposed to over-efforting to support upright posture, it’s useful to give your body some novel input to wake up your nervous system.

You have to alert your cerebellum—the part of your brain responsible for balance and coordination—to the fact that your habitual alignment isn’t the only option, and likely isn’t even the most efficient option.

Use the following practice to play with your body’s alignment with respect to gravity.

1. Using the neutral alignment you established in the previous practice, gently rock your body forward and backward, shifting weight from your heels to your toes.

At first, make the swings bigger and more accentuated. Try to move from your ankle joint as opposed to bending at the hips or curving your spine. Allow your whole body, staying in neutral alignment, to shift up onto your toes, and then slowly—slowly!—rock back onto your heels.

The goal is to really feel your body at every point along the trajectory. Feel the pressure change in your feet, notice what’s balanced and secure and what feels way out of control.

2. Start to make the swings smaller by degrees. As you pass through the center of your foot moving from heel to toes, then toes back to heel, pay attention to the point at which you feel most balanced, the place at which you feel the least amount of muscular tension in your body.

3. Slow down your movement, coming to rest in that sweet spot of balance. You should feel centered over your feet with your weight equally distributed between your heels and toes. There should be little or no tension in your legs and shoulders.

Congratulations, you’ve completed the second stage in finding neutral alignment.

Ninja Level

If you want to take this practice up a notch, I highly recommend getting on a wobble board. A wobble board is a wooden or plastic disc with a spherical bottom that allows you to rock in 360 degrees.

The wobble board is like a back door into balance. When you put instability under you, your brain has to work overtime to find a connection to the ground. Simply standing on the board and rocking it from right to left across the center (without rolling on the rim), and then back to front (again, no rolling on the rim), can be enough to stimulate your brain to distribute weight more evenly across your base of support—your feet and legs.

Wobble boards have many excellent uses, including balance and stability training. They’re great tools for that, but in this particular case, I’m not concerned with how well you can balance in the center or whether you can stand on one foot while not falling over.

What we want here is to train your brain to distribute weight evenly across both feet, and from front to back. You want to stimulate all the vectors of movement, side to side and front to back. You can also spend some time rolling the board in a circle on the rim if you want to wake up your ankle joints a bit more.

Many people use Bosu balls for stability and balance training, but I prefer wobble boards for this practice because with the Bosu ball, you always have some contact with the ground. It therefore doesn’t seem to stimulate the cerebellum quite as effectively to trigger centered balance.

Wobble boards can be found in most sporting goods stores, but this one is my personal favorite. I have no problem recommending this board and using my affiliate link after my experience with it in my office. It’s made of solid wood that has stood up to many years of use with clients. I like the grippy tape on the top to prevent slip, and the fact that it has three adjustable heights to modify the challenge for those at a higher skill level. Also, it’s a full 20″ whereas many less expensive wobble boards are a mere 15″.

(If you happen to buy the board using the link above, I get a little pocket change. Enough for coffee. Not enough for a pony.)

And if you’re looking for more practices to help you develop a centered body, my Posture Rehab system lays out just such exercises with step by step videos to help you alleviate muscle tension that’s pulling your body out of alignment.

Click here to buy the course and get instant access to the complete library of videos >>

1. http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/99Meltzoff_BornToLearn.pdf
2. https://wholewoman.com/blog/?p=1773
3. https://erikdalton.com/media/42lb-head/

Since we’ve covered some of the common myths that make achieving good posture an exercise in frustration — not to mention causing more damage to your body than even doing nothing at all — let’s switch gears and talk about a more constructive model for good posture.

(This is the third post in a series on fixing bad posture. If you missed the first two, click here to read those first, then come back).

I know you’re probably jonesing to get ahead and start the actual process of fixing your posture, but let me assure you that understanding these principles is essential to the health of your body. If you jump into the how-to before you understand the why, you’re just going to wind up frustrated because understanding how something works can be imperative to its success.

Posture is one such thing where this definitely applies.

If pressed to define good posture, I would honestly say that after thirteen years of treating clients, I don’t believe it truly exists, which puts us in a bit of a conundrum since here I am writing a whole series about good posture—and here you are, reading it.

It’s a bold assertion, for sure, to say that I don’t believe in good posture while simultaneously writing about it, but if you examine the previous post covering what good posture is not, you’ll start to see a pattern emerging.

Note that I didn’t talk about specific types of alignment, angles of shoulders, or metrics for your spine. I didn’t address rotations and counter rotations of limbs, pronation and supination of your feet, or reverse curvature of the neck.

Do I look at these things when I’m treating clients? Sure. They’re great sources of information. But addressing these specific, objective metrics of posture without also considering the principles of healthy alignment is ultimately futile.

I am not so much concerned about your body’s static alignment (although this is certainly one cornerstone of good posture) as I am focused on your potential for movement.

My concept of good posture has less to do with standards and rules and more to do with a broad scope of principles about the ways in which healthy bodies stand and move. The conventional view of posture as a static “pose” that your body holds is only a small piece of this broader view.

In order to understand this fresh take on posture, it’s helpful to view your body not as an object that can be in binary states, like broken or fixed, but as more of a process that is always becoming something.

Your body isn’t just a dumb machine carrying your brain around. Rather than viewing your body as an object, like a car, I encourage you to shift toward seeing yourself more as an information system. Your body is always taking in data about its environment, then shifting and responding accordingly.

It does this through cells in your muscles and fascia—or connective tissue—called proprioceptors that sense position and movement and make adjustments to balance, coordination, and muscle tone accordingly.

The input that you give your body in this moment will influence its output — or posture. Your brain is always “listening” to your body and then sending directives back as necessary. Posture, therefore, isn’t a mind-over-body phenomenon, but rather a mind-body integrative experience.

With this novel view of your body as a process instead of an object in mind, let’s define new parameters for what constitutes “good posture.”

Good Posture Treats the Body as a Synergistic Organism That Is Entirely Connected

It’s not unusual in my office to hear complaints about specific body parts with relation to posture. People generally focus on shoulders or hips, and they want to know which muscle is causing all their ills.

However, every part of your body is connected to the rest of you. This seems obvious, right? I mean, if you weren’t connected, you really would lose your head on the regular.

But you would be surprised at what a revelation this concept can be. I mean, you “know” intellectually that things are connected, but but when you experience the effect your gait has on your neck and shoulders, for example, it can be kind of eye opening.

That pain in your back may actually be related to immobility in your hips, or your neck strain is due to a fixation in your ankle. You can’t change the movement in any given joint without affecting the whole body.

Symptoms are not causes. Pain in one area does not necessarily indicate a localized problem. When addressing your posture, it’s important to keep in mind that hunched forward shoulders aren’t just a shoulder problem, and back pain isn’t localized in your spine.

This is where the pain is, but it may not be the place that needs attention in your body. Truly functional models for good posture take a holistic approach to correcting physical imbalances, looking at how all the various elements of your body work together to create function or dysfunction.

Good Posture Prioritizes Ease over Tension

Most people have enough stuff on their to-do list, right? We don’t really need to add “mind your posture” as another note on the pink post-it in your pocket.

And besides, we as humans are already way too good at being tense. People don’t need to learn to be more tense; we’ve got that one down. We need to learn to relax.

As a society, we have a cultural addiction to tension, as evidenced by all the “hard bodies” on magazine covers and in the media. Somehow, we’ve conflated health with tone, when in actuality, the two are quite different.

(Strength is also not the same as tone, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Excessive tension and muscle mass limit your range of motion and dull your sensory input. Tight, restrictive muscles prohibit free movement of a joint, which results in a diminished number of available movement patterns. These limited neuromuscular patterns become dominant due to overuse, until other available movements shrink away.

In short, you get stuck in one way of moving to the exclusion of all others. That pattern becomes fixed, like a prison you can’t escape, until you’re stuck in what you might call “bad posture.” In reality, it’s not the posture that’s bad, it’s the loss of other available movement options due to too much tension in your muscles and the ensuing restricted joint mobility.

Many of my clients report that they had no idea how tight something was until the tension was dissolved and movement restored. This is because the body feels itself through movement. If a part of your body doesn’t move, your brain isn’t getting proprioceptive input from the sensory nerves.

The more ease there is in your body, the more resilient you will be, like the proverbial green twig. A body that is rigid and tense quickly loses its springy elasticity. The tissue quality becomes dry and fibrous, like stiff beef jerky instead of the juiciness of a fresh steak.

So, truly good, functional posture will prioritize relaxed, supple, available muscles over rigid, tense, uptight ones.

Good Posture Employs Dynamic Alignment

I may not believe in good posture, but I do believe in optimal alignment. However, the way in which I define this differs slightly from the conventional view of a properly aligned body.

There is a central axis around which your body organizes (your core). When all of the “blocks” of your body are stacked up optimally, your muscles require very little physical energy to maintain an upright stance.

This organized place is the sweet spot where your musculoskeletal system is perfectly balanced in gravity, where your bones are stacked, distributing compressive force throughout your skeletal structure with the least amount of impact on joints and soft tissue.

I call this place “neutral alignment.” It’s the center of your balance, a mid-point through which you move into and out of as you go about your day. It’s not a static spot in which you place your body and hold it, but rather a “rest within the work” of your perpetual movement.

While this place of ease with respect to gravity is optimal for diminishing strain throughout your body, it’s also fleeting because you are in constant motion. Even when seated and relatively static, your body is performing complex calculations and cycling through the firing of various muscle fibers to keep you in position.

While staying in this perfect place of equilibrium is impossible, exploring it is essential. Giving your body an experience of effortless balance allows you to release muscle tension that frees your limbs up for movement. The more experiences like this that your body has, the more easily you’ll be able to return to balanced, upright posture when you notice strain starting to form in your muscles — ideally before the pain sets in.

Good Posture Focuses on Diversifying and Repatterning Neural Pathways

Multiple studies have shown almost no correlation between pain, injury, and posture¹. But we also know that certain postures do cause measurable musculoskeletal strain² and the Center for Disease Control reports that 32% of injuries resulting in missed work are related to occupational over-exertion or repetitive strain³.

So, while no given posture may be proven to be connected to any one type of pain, it’s certainly likely that imbalances in your body paired with the strain of sitting or standing for long periods of time at a stretch can result in physical pain.

Sitting and standing in fixed positions causes compressive force to travel through a very limited number of vectors in your body. Basically, it puts all the strain on very small points that take the brunt of the burden of supporting your body day after day.

It doesn’t take a brain leap to understand how this will result in tissue breakdown, muscular strain, joint degeneration, inflammation and any number of other “normal” conditions that people suffer with all the time.

But what is there to do? Well, changing posture in the conventional sense doesn’t help, as per the above noted studies. But optimizing movement does. The more you move your body in novel ways, the more well-distributed strain is throughout your joints and soft tissue network (and the less likely you are to get stuck in that one, single position).

Movement isn’t probably the first thing you think about when you consider your posture, but it might actually be the most important.

Good Posture Works on Shaping Rather Than “Fixing” Poor Alignment

When you start to observe your body more as a process that is unfurling which you can shape in any direction you choose, correcting your posture becomes less about “fixing” postural ills and more about supplying the right input to move in a more healthy direction.

Two, ten, or thirty minutes of postural training aimed at targeting your stooped shoulders can’t compete with a lifetime spent in a perpetual stoop.

Everything you do has the potential to support damaging posture or create new, beneficial neural patterns. And it’s not just what you do, but rather how you do it.

Generating optimal posture and movement is less about doing a particular type of exercise and more about optimizing what you’re already doing. In all frankness, I can give you every postural correction exercise in the known world. I can give you the exact maneuvers that will make your pain vanish. And I would still put money down that, after an initial period of interest, you won’t do them.

I cannot tell you how many people come to my practice with painful symptoms and, when I inquire as to the things that helped them to feel better, they tell me that physical therapy was useful. When I ask if they’re still doing their physical therapy exercises, a sheepish look comes over their faces and they admit that they’re not.

It’s not that the exercises fail. Like diets, it’s the doing that’s the problem. Life is busy. It’s full of stressors and to-do lists and children who need attention, holidays, families, friends and late night work projects. While therapeutic exercises seem initially vital, their importance fades to the background along with the symptoms they treat.

None of us has time to make posture a second, third or fourth job. But if you can incorporate the principles of healthy posture into your daily life, bringing alignment and diversified movement to what you’re already doing, you’ll have much more sustainable, long-term results.

These principles can apply to anything from yoga to running, weight lifting, gymnastics, rock climbing, horseback riding, or even simply how you sit or stand in front of your computer.

Creating diverse movement patterns that shape your body in beneficial ways helps you to not get stuck or fixed in suboptimal posture. There really is no “bad” posture, since posture is merely a temporary shape that your body is making in a moment. But if you make the same shape repeatedly, you run the risk of becoming stuck in it.

Want extra help with your posture? My book Perfect Posture for Life is chock full of alignment wisdom, step by step practices and secret nutrients that melt away pain. Click here to buy it and start reading immediately!

1. https://www.bettermovement.org/ blog/2014/does-bad-posture-cause-back-pain?rq=posture
2. https://erikdalton.com/media/42lb-head/
3. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/97-141/ pdfs/97-141.pdf?id=10.26616/NIOSHPUB97141

In the first part of this series on fixing poor posture, we covered how slumped, rounded body-positions not only contribute to aches and pains but also affect your stress levels, mood, and confidence.

(If you haven’t read it yet, click here to do that and then come back to this post once you’re done.)

Not to belabor the positive benefits of standing up straight, but your posture has the power to contribute to myriad health benefits. In addition to the ones listed above, correct posture has the potential to reduce muscle tension and pain, eliminate constipation and digestive issues, increase flexibility, improve focus and productivity, free up breathing, improve problem solving abilities, optimize sleep, and generally make you feel like you’re ten years younger.

At this point, you’re probably starting to sit a little straighter and pull your shoulders back. I mean, after all, who wouldn’t want all these amazing mind-body health benefits from something that is so simple and completely free?!

But hold up a sec, kay? Before you go stiffening your spine into a petrified column and paralyzing your shoulders beneath layers of muscular tension that lock them in place, let’s take a moment to talk about what good posture actually is, because I can virtually guarantee that our definitions don’t match.

Seriously, if I read another blog post telling people to roll their shoulders up, back and down before pinning them in place, and then suggesting they brace their abs in some convoluted notion of core strength, I might just gag on my single origin pour over coffee.

There’s a lot of useless mumbo-jumbo floating around out there, so often repeated that everyone assumes it’s true. But let me tell you, the way you’ve been doing posture is probably all wrong.

The good news, though, is that once you fully understand why these common posture tips don’t work, it makes actually getting good posture so much easier!

So, without further ado, here are four super common posture myths that are actually hurting your body:

No. 1 Good Posture Is Static

When most people think of posture, they assume it’s the opposite of movement. Posture is the thing you do when you’re not moving.

Only, you’re never not moving. Your body is a perpetual motion machine. Even when you think that you’re holding still, there is constant variance. Not only do your heart and respiration rates ebb and flow, your muscles are also continually adjusting to maintain upright balance regardless of whether you’re sitting or standing.

Not only are your muscles always moving, your bio-rhythms also vary endlessly. For example, a healthy heart will have a fluctuating rate that shows up as irregular on an EKG. Stasis, on the other hand, is the enemy of health. Before a sudden cardiac arrest, a person’s heart rate increases in regularity, which corresponds to a loss of resilience¹.

When most people think of posture, they think of a straight spine, shoulders pulled back, belly sucked in and held tightly, chin tucked. I know this because I’ve been a posture and movement therapist for nearly fifteen years, and every time I tell a group of people what it is that I do, I watch them assume this stiff-backed, rigid position.

But that’s not actually what posture is. Posture is merely the shape that your body is making in this moment. Because we, as modern humans, tend to make the same shapes over and over again, these “poses” become habitual and comfortable. We then assume them more and more regularly, and this ultimately ossifies into what you call your “posture.”

The goal of good posture is not to put your body into an ideal alignment that correlates to a grid and keep it there indefinitely. There is no objective norm that all bodies measure up to. The goal of good posture is actually to facilitate movement so that you can live your life and do the things you love with ease.

No. 2 Good Posture Requires Strength and Tension

One of the biggest reasons that conventional approaches to fixing posture often fail is because they rely solely on creating more effort within the body. You have to literally hold your shoulders, spine and hips in place, contracting muscles to sustain a rigid pose that exhausts your efforts within just a few seconds.

That darn body, always so wayward and in need of direction from the far superior and more sophisticated brain!

But if all of your muscular tension is already engaged in stabilizing your body, you’ll have little left to devote to the tasks of movement and expression. According to Neurologist Daniel Wolpert, the sole reason that humans have brains is to coordinate and execute movement². That’s it. It’s kind of mindblowing (haha), but true.

The best posture prioritizes ease over tension. A body that is relaxed is conserving energy and available for movement at any moment. Trying to consciously control your body’s position with muscle tension is not only exhausting, it’s impractical. Muscles cannot be both relaxed and contracted at the same time.

If all of your muscles are otherwise engaged in holding your body in place, this leaves little room for movement and expression. It means your body is maintaining an isometric contraction hour after hour, day after day. Even more than poor posture, this kind of static body bracing is a recipe for soreness and pain.

In order to initiate locomotion (movement), you need muscles that can contract, thus propelling your body forward.

No. 2 Good Posture is Something You Consciously Do

If good posture doesn’t require physical bracing, then it also doesn’t require your constant, conscious awareness. A lot of my clients think they need to “work” on their posture. They think that the reason their posture is failing is due to a lack of constant attention and diligence.

The reality is that it’s entirely impractical to pay constant attention to your posture. Your body doesn’t need policing from your brain. It executes many functions just fine on its own. If you had to think about which muscle to contract and in what order every time you took a step, you’d never walk anywhere.

Similarly, you can sit and stand without having to tell your body how to do it. Even the most mindful person will lose focus on their posture as soon as attention shifts to completing a project at work or deciding what to eat for dinner.

This is not to say that mindfulness isn’t beneficial. There are absolutely times where putting your attention on your posture and movement can be exploratory and informative. But the fact of the matter is that constant attention as a long term strategy for resolving postural issues is sure to fail.

This should be a relief, honestly. Your postural problems are not a result of your inherent laziness or lack of willpower. They’re not a function of not paying enough attention, nor of not working hard enough at putting your body into an ideal position.

We’ll get more into what constitutes good posture later in this series, but for now, suffice it to say that good posture is actually easy to maintain, and it doesn’t require the brain to “nanny” the body.

No. 4 Good Posture is One Size Fits All

Many models for good posture assume that all people, when standing straight, look the same. They state that if your spine has wiggles, if your hips are tilted a bit too far in this direction or that, that you do not have good posture.

People are different. The length of your femur (thigh bone) with relation to your trunk will not be the same as mine, nor will its orientation to the pelvis³. Two people of the same height and weight can have drastically different body structures.

Therefore, what your posture looks like is much less important than how it feels. But, alas, most of us have been trained to measure our bodies by external metrics and not by our own internal experiences.

We’ve been taught and it has been long conventionally assumed that structural imbalances impact physical health and propensity for injury, but in fact there has been no such proven link⁴.

Eek, wait, what are we doing here reading all about how to get better posture if it has no impact on your physical health? Well, as in all things, there’s a catch. You see, if you define posture by hard metrics broadly applied across all people, then no, there’s no link.

But if you redefine the very concept of good posture, which we’ll get into in depth in our next post in this series, then posture very much impacts your well-being.

What I want you to understand here, though, is that your perfect posture is not everyone’s ideal. What works for you will be individual and based on your unique structure. That doesn’t mean we can’t optimize your posture for your life; it just means you’re not going to get much benefit from following arbitrary guidelines.

In summary, good posture is not static, rigid, nor one size fits all. While there are some reasonable, common principles, truly functional posture will be fluid, dynamic, and tailored to an individual’s structure, activities, and lifestyle.

Want more posture goodness? My ebook Perfect Posture for Life goes way more in depth on all of this, plus gives you specific practices to decrease muscular tension so you can stand taller and move more freely. Click here to order it.

1. Claxton, Guy. “Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More Than It Thinks. Yale University Press, 2015. Digital.
2. https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_ reason_for_brains?language=en
3. https://themovementfix.com/the-best-kept-secret-why-people-have-to-squat-differently/
4. https://www.bettermovement.org/blog/2014/does-bad-posture-cause-back-pain?rq=posture%20pain