A Profile on Posture
What do you get when you spend everyday for 2 years studying, thinking about, experimenting, and measuring posture on yourself and dozens of others?
You get to be a freak like me.
There’s no denying posture it’s importance. On the obvious side, if you ignore it you’ll have pain and slowly become a disfigured human as you adapt to a modern environment. Socially, body-language expresses a good deal of information about the health and mood of the person. Confidence, tiredness, openness, etc.…it’s all expressed more reliably and honestly through body-language than through words.
Here’s maybe what you didn’t know about posture:
1) Remember the fact that if you smile for a minute your brain is tricked into being happy? I know, it sounds similar to “lead the water to the horse and the horse will drink.” Posture can work the same way! Someone who is anxious or stressed may have their shoulder hunched up. It works in the inverse as well. Sit in a slouchy position and you may find it difficult to summon feelings of power and optimism.
2) It affects your long term joint health and the ability to be a mobile independent human. The analogy being wheel alignment on a car. Wheels that aren’t all pointing straight forward will cause undue wear-n-tear on the system. Similarly, the body has a way of moving that is most natural and smooth for it. Go long enough in a fault pattern and you get ACL issues, low back pain etc.
Maintaining good joint range of motion is not just to keep you safe but to maximize both your strength output and the effectiveness of exercise.
3) What is good posture anyways?
From an exercise standpoint it just means ‘good form’ and comes with a lot of common themes like “straight spine”, or “neutral hips”. It’s alignment that allows your body to operate at it’s safest and most effective: unlike a bending over with a rounded back.
From am everyday standpoint, good stationary posture doesn’t exist. Standing for long periods of time is no better than sitting, just ask waiters and waitresses. It’s about a variety of positions that shuffles through different sets of muscles used to keep you in that position. So basically, a body that isn’t moving has two choices, ‘worse’ and ‘worser’ positions.
Right now lean in your chair one way and then after a few minutes lean the other way, sit back, lean forward, switch hands you’re using for the phone, stand up, kneel on a pad, etc. Posture is a largely a habit, but people can get so far into a certain way of sitting/standing that if they don’t utilize a certain range of motion in a joint, they’ll slowly lose it.
Having a large range of motion in a joint is a waste of energy for a body that is just trying to survive and conserve energy. So if you never want to be able to sit up straight, then don’t ever do it and eventually you won’t have a choice. Basically: if you don’t use it you lose it. Look at the picture of the man playing tennis. How far do you think he can extend (arch back) his upper spine?
4) How do you fix poor posture? Sadly, there is no good data on exercise alone being able to influence posture. Posture at the end of the day is a habit. Don’t get me wrong, exercise and stretching can set you up for better posture in the fact that you ought to train and maintain a usable range of motion in each joint, but it’s largely in the 23 hours a day you spend not training that determines your what body positioning feels ‘normal’. So be professional and freakin’ set up a reminder system for you to move around and to avoid the ‘worser’ positions.
How do you regain lost range of motion? I will be able to tell you if you need a physical therapist/chiro, or as a last resort surgery. But for most cases I can help you effectively expand functional range of motion and teach you to maintain all the joint mobility you need to keep you involved in your desired lifestyle long into the last stages of life. To get real: be able to keep up with the kids, travel and explore, and continue your active hobbies like golf or tennis.