Does it matter how straight we stand? Or is a certain amount of crookedness just natural? Can we even do anything about it?
updated 6/26/08
Stand Up Straight
A detailed exploration of concepts in posture and posture exercises
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MOREclose
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
This article discusses postural exercise theory in detail. If you’d prefer a shorter article that reviews specific postural exercise methods, see Posture Exercises for Posture Correction. If you need more general advice for muscle pain, see Save Yourself from Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome!
The ways that we sit and stand are among the strongest of habits — and so changing your posture is just as difficult as quitting smoking or Timbits. Health-conscious people are often haunted by the idea that they “should” change their posture, and they fight an chronic and uncertain battle against crookedness.
But can aches and pains and other health problems really be traced to poor posture? Even if they can, is a change in posture a practical solution? Is the effort worthwhile?
After working as a massage therapist for many years now, I am reasonably confident that poor posture is sometimes related to significant health problems, particularly later in life, and probably can also be corrected with effort and skilled guidance.
But it’s not a straightforward business, this posture stuff, and I have many reasonable doubts about the importance and therapeutic effectiveness of postural training.
To be honest, I didn’t think I would be that interested in a long article about posture. But once I started, I couldn’t stop!
Katherine Hettler, organic farmer
Is this the right article for you?
This article is long-winded, detailed and thoughtful — hopefully entertaining as well — and is intended for readers who really want to wrap their heads around the subject. For a more concise overview of posture correction, see my much shorter article, Posture Exercises for Posture Correction. The two overlap. The shorter version is basically a summary of this one.
Many people researching posture are doing so because of chronic pain of some kind, especially muscle pain caused by trigger points or muscle knots (myofascial pain syndrome). This website offers excellent tutorials on muscle strain, myofascial pain syndrome, and low back pain and neck pain. Move your mouse over each of these links for more information about those tutorials (requires Javascript), or just click ‘em.
Save Yourself from Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome!
Save Yourself from Low Back Pain!
Save Yourself from Neck Pain!
Save Yourself from Muscle Strain!
Posture is the physical manifestation of your comfort zone — which can be like a cage.
Changing your posture doesn’t come easily
It is not “just” your posture — it is the way you live, the shape of your “container” (your body), the physical manifestation of your comfort zone. Most people struggle when they try to leave that zone. This is the greatest dilemma of postural exercise: trying to change often makes us feel even worse. It makes it almost impossible to know whether or not you are succeeding, because success may not necessarily feel good at first.
Trying to change your posture runs you headlong into one of the most basic problems of all healing: if you were the kind of person who could readily avoid this problem in the first place, you already would have done it. Patterns in peoples lives that lead to dysfunction are almost always strong patterns — if they weren’t, they never would have caused much of a problem in the first place!
So postural change is clearly one of those places where angels may fear to tread. You’re messing with really basic stuff when you try to mess with posture.
Patterns in peoples lives that lead to dysfunction are almost always strong patterns.
Posture exercises are not supported by science
The second major problem is that your efforts will not be supported by much science, and there’s not much hope of that ever changing. This isn’t exactly a deal-breaker for most people, but it’s frustrating that what little research exists is ambiguous and contradictory. For every “fact” about posture, there are a dozen challengers.
And so, the seemingly technical challenge of changing postural habits is nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s almost entirely in the realm of art and faith, not science. Measures of success are primarily subjective. This means that you can never be sure that what you are doing is the “right thing,” which is unfortunate when the challenge is so great.
For every “fact” about posture, there are a dozen challengers.
This lack of certainty about the value and methods is so acute that, as a health care professional, I am forced to do a lot of guessing when I teach my clients to “stand up straight.” I have to do so much guessing, in fact, that I’ve virtually stopped recommending to anyone that they bother — not because I think it’s necessarily a worthless pursuit, but because teaching to patients offers them a lousy bang for their buck. When people are paying me $100/hour, I stick to things I know are effective.
That said, my guessing about posture is pretty educated guessing. Here on the internet, where you aren’t paying for my time, I’m free to offer my ideas!
What are the risks of poor posture? Muscle imbalance and joint dysfunction, and (strange but true) getting into an emotional rut …
Muscle imbalance
We live in a gravity field that never quits: day in, day out, it pulls us straight towards the center of the earth. If we stand crookedly, chronically, we obviously increase the load upon one side the body, and decrease it on the other.
This is not necessarily a big deal. Lots of people live in gravity and never have pain problems.
However, gravity-living may be one of the basic stresses of life that leads to clinically significant “muscle imbalance,” a concept that must be clearly understood by anyone interested in changing posture.
Lots of people live in gravity and never have pain problems.
Every joint in our body is surrounded by muscles that are always pulling — even when deeply relaxed, many muscle cells are still working. If muscles on one side of the neck begin to shorten, the muscles on the other side of the neck must respond by increasing their tension as well: otherwise your head would fall over to one side.
In fact, sometimes your head does fall over to one side — a poor head posture. In this case, the muscles are not “balanced.” The battle between them usually causes trigger points, more commonly known as knots in your muscles.
This surprisingly ordinary condition is probably be the source of the vast majority of the aches and pains suffered by the human race, especially low back pain, and costs our society many millions of dollars in reduced economic productivity, to say nothing of quality of life.
If poor posture contributes to the formation of knots in tired muscles — which is far from proven, but it’s a reasonable theory — then it’s might be a good idea to improve your posture.
Joint dysfunction
The more primary problem of muscle imbalance will lead to more serious problems over the years. Joint dysfunction tends to follow muscle imbalance and trigger point formation. If the muscles were fine, most joints would never have a problem.
Research has shown that abnormal curvature of the cervical spine is actually not closely associated with neck pain.
But if your neck is crooked and exhausted, the mechanics of the spinal joints are changed. They do not move evenly. This likely increases the speed at which they degenerate later in life, and possibly the frequency of episodes of neck cricks. But don’t get too scared, because research has actually shown that abnormal curvature of the cervical spine is not closely associated with neck pain! (See Grob.)
Degenerative arthritis is a universal human condition — everybody develops it eventually, to some degree. But some people develop it much more quickly than others — possibly because of messy muscular control of the joints, which in turn may be caused by poor posture.
Degenerative arthritis is not as horrifying a consequence of a poor habit as those that come from, say, smoking — but it’s worth avoiding. If possible. Which isn’t clear.
Emotional rut
A more subtle problem with poor posture is the “comfort zone” problem.
A poor posture is usually associated with a particular emotional response to life — an attitude. We hold ourselves in a certain way because it reflects our comfort with the position — and our discomfort with any other position, such as “holding our head high.” Just as people eat comfort food to their detriment, we may also slouch comfortably to our detriment.
By leaving poor posture unchallenged, we fail to leave our emotional comfort zone, which is generally necessary for personal and spiritual growth. See Personal Growth: The art of healing by growing up.
So … how much does all of that really matter?
The evidence suggests that posture is not terribly important. It’s been proven, for instance, that people with significant leg length differences suffer from no more back pain than anyone else. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, it’s been proven that a whole bunch of different kinds of crookedness are not good predictors of pain. Another important SaveYourself.ca article is devoted to that subject: see Your Back Is Not “Out” and Your Leg Length is Fine: The story of the obsession with crookedness in the physical therapies.
But this is what it boils down to …
Personally, I have seen a lot of patients with reasonably good posture who were in terrible pain, and a lot of clients with terrible posture who had very few complaints. For instance, I have a truly scoliotic patient, an elderly woman with a blatantly obvious S-curve in her spine that she has had since she was a child, who has suffered no worse than annoying back stiffness in her whole life.
Meanwhile, I have a virtual parade of people through my office with severe, debilitating back pain … and perfectly normal posture.
I have seen a lot of patients with reasonably good posture who were in terrible pain, and a lot of clients with terrible posture who had few complaints.
Another good example: a client with a true “wry neck.” Born with a twisted neck, he is permanently tilted such that his facial bones have remodelled themselves so that his eyes are level with the horizon. (Seriously.) If he straightens his neck — which feels crooked to him! — his eyes are unnervingly lopsided. But, once again, this patient suffers from no more than mild annoyance, while meanwhile people with normal head posture are virtually unable to function because of neck pain.
I have seen a lot of patients with reasonably good posture who were in terrible pain, and a lot of clients with terrible posture who have few complaints.
In spite of these caveats, I have nevertheless seen numerous cases over the years where relatively obvious postural and ergonomic problems did cause pain — and the pain was relieved when the problem was resolved. In spite of the many contradictions and uncertainties, I think that cases like this are reason enough to believe that some postural problems are almost certainly harmful … and some of them also correctable.
Good posture is not a postition
It’s an oversimplification to say that a posture is a position. It’s probably more of a process, or a situation, or a response. An efficient (and complex) physical response to gravity, perhaps.
That sounds good, and a lot of postural exercise teachers will talk about “an efficient response to gravity” with confidence, but I do not believe that anyone actually knows what an “efficient” posture is. How do we know if a posture “works”? Unfortunately, we don’t and we probably can’t. This would require complex studies that have never been done, and — if they were done — would still not yield clear answers.
If you “stand up straight,” and you never suffer from aches and pains, you will probably come to believe that standing up straight is good posture. And it might be … for you. But we are the only species on planet Earth that regularly stands up straight, and there are many reasons to believe that this erectness is a biological compromise of questionable value and comfort. Scientists are not sure why we ever stood up in the first place, and there is no evidence today that standing up especially straight is necessarily the way to go … or has any survival benefit … or, if it does, that it will necessarily be comfortable …
Among all species, only humans stand upright
Consider your spine. It is essentially the same spine owned by every mammal in the world. And nearly all of those mammals carry their spine horizontally. So where did we ever get the idea that we should stack our backbones end on end?
There is no obvious sign that our anatomy has significantly or effectively adapted to the upright position. For instance, the connective tissues of our abdomen are still almost identical to those of the quadrupeds: they are designed for holding our guts suspended below our horizontal lumbar spines, not for holding them like a sack tied to a vertical pole.
Much more discussion of this idea can be found in the article Natural Imperfection.
So I definitely question the “stand-up-straight” definition of good posture. Good posture is not necessarily about straightness!
I am not saying we shouldn’t stand up straight. I am just pointing out — again! — the uncertainties associated with posture. There is reason to doubt anyone who claims to know what good posture is. The facts are not in, and for now we must make do without.
The difference between postural strain and “bad” posture
Another thing that makes it hard to define posture, or nail it down as a particular position, good or bad: the difference between postural strain and bad posture.
Carrying a heavy backpack slung over one shoulder is a postural strain — it is a circumstance that makes it difficult to be comfortable, or to maintain what we probably think of as a good posture.
Typing incessantly is a postural strain. It’s not a bad habit, it’s something that (some of us) have to do — and it is a challenge to our bodies.
You can see the crossover with ergonomics here. A lot of postural strains are about ergonomics. Not all, but many.
A poor posture can be defined in contrast to postural strain: it is generated from within, instead of impose from without.
Many allegedly “postural” problems can be solved by finding ways of removing the strain — or even just by identifying the strain. It’s surprising how often people don’t even notice that a postural strain is an issue. They can be subtle. I recall a case of a man with terrible chronic upper back pain who simply had a nasty computer workstation. He was barely conscious of it being the source of the problem — but once it was pointed out, the list of awkward things about it grew and grew, and a number of creative solutions were required to fix it up. Perhaps too many!
A little more about ergonomics
Ergonomics is the science of arranging or designing things for efficient use, specifically to avoid postural strain as discussed above. Unfortunately, ergonomics is usually interpreted unimaginatively, with the result that most people think that ergonomics is just about choosing office chairs and changing the tilt on your keyboard. Lots of things can indeed be said about office chairs and the tilt of your keyboard — but it’s only the tip of the ergonomics iceberg.
What a perfect comic strip I found! This perfectly illustrates what I’m trying to say: that conventional ergonomics solutions may be missing the point, and often get out of hand.
What discussions about ergonomics usually miss is that long work days in a chair are just a fundamentally bad idea — no matter how good your chair is. Ergonomics should not be focussed on ways of making people more comfortable with a bad situation — almost a conspiracy against workers — but rather on improving the situation. Conventional ergonomics, when “arranging things for efficient use” — tends to exclude the most important thing in your workstation: you!
The consequences of ergonomics that ignore you range from the irritating to the traumatic. This fascinating collection of videos of ergonomic disasters has some examples.
For some ideas about “arranging” a few things other than your workstation, see Unconventional Ergonomics: Five creative ergonomics tips you don’t hear as much about as the usual stuff.
What is good posture, then? Three suggestions
I propose that good posture probably has three important qualities. It is (1) dynamic, (2) moderate and (3) inspired. These words are all attempts to cope with the lack of reliable information about posture. They are all suggest strategies to use when in doubt:
- The dynamic posture
A dynamic posture emphasizes change and movement. It is not a position, but a state. Keeping active, frequently changing our posture and experimenting with new ways of moving through the world, is probably a good solution to the uncertainties of postural science. It is also a safe assumption that most people lead overly sedentary lives; even people who are active at work are often only active in one way, and need variety. More movement — not a position, but more positions — is definitely a safe bet and a good start on a good posture.
- The moderate posture
A moderate posture is one that strikes a balance between the path of least resistance and obsessive and excessive effort. Again, this is not a position, but a condition or even a style or attitude, a philosophy that will have different effects on your posture at different times. A good posture is any posture that never strays too far from the comfort zone, but does not linger there either.
- The inspired posture
Finally, a good posture is inspired. Another good word for this posture is “curious.” A curious posture is one adopted out of interested self-awareness. Such a posture is individually expressive, acknowledging and demonstrating that there probably is no such thing as one correct posture for all people. Your good posture may be just as distinctively you as your poor posture. An inspired posture is one that you seek out yourself because you want solutions to unique challenges, because you want to know how it feels to use your own body in a new way.
So, good posture is probably not a position. It is more of an attitude or a style, a complex and moving picture of how a person inhabits his or her body.
Poor posture isn’t a position either
If a good posture is dynamic, moderate and inspired, then a poor posture could be called (1) static, (2) lazy, and/or (3) oblivious. In fact, that does seem to me to be a pretty good description of poor posture. I see the worst consequences of poor posture in people with these qualities, rather than in people who chronically adopt a particular position. Let’s look at these problem postures in more detail …
The static posture
People who sustain postures — any postures, straight or crooked ones — for long periods of time, tend to suffer consequences.
A variation on this is the person who is active, but without variety, which leads to a specific disaster: repetitive strain injuries.
The extreme posture
A less obvious poor posture is the tendency to be extreme: specifically, to spend too much time in the comfort zone, or not enough. That is, the person who is either lazy, or too active (very rare). A deadly combination is found in the “weekend warrior” phenomenon: physically lazy all week at the office and then very active on the weekend, a lifestyle of flip-flopping between extremes.
Poor posture? Or just taking a break from gravity? Somehow I don’t think this position is hurting him!
Unfortunately, some postural educators teach people to be extreme. I know one educator who tells his clients, “Gravity never takes a break! Neither should you!” I object to such advice on principle, not in particular. He might be right. But I doubt it, and there’s no way to know. Without facts, let’s back away from the edge unless we have a specific reason to push the envelope.
Disciplined and oblivious postures
I object to postural discipline or obliviousness, which are the opposites of an inspired posture.
People who adopt a disciplined approach to posture, who strut about trying to cram themselves into the right shape, may seem inspired — it’s possible, perhaps, with certain personalities, but in general I think such an approach is more likely to be lifeless, that is actually an incurious response to the world. By nature, discipline forces a “one-size-fits-all” position onto the individual, discouraging self-knowledge and personal expression.
Every health professional is familiar with this overzealous client: it is actually very difficult to dissuade such people from following advice! They want to do whatever I think is right — and thus are less likely to discover themselves.
People who adopt a disciplined approach to posture may seem inspired, but I do not think that they are.
At the other end of the spectrum, poor posture may also be marked as uninspired by the absence of interest in the body. Discipline is so generally destructive that obliviousness may seem to get much better results just by not being fanatical, but it is also problematic. I know people who are happily oblivious to postural concerns, people who would consider this entire article a mind-boggling waste of time. For some of them, it is, because they enjoy a natural vitality — dynamic, moderate and inspired — that could only be wrecked by overanalysis. But most oblivious people are postural time bombs, paying no attention to the problem until they start to hurt, and only then beginning a steep learning curve about their own bodies.
So, just like good posture, poor posture is probably more of an attitude or a style, not a position.
The $64,000 question: should you try to change your posture?
Try it and see what happens.
For some people, the cure turns out to be worse than the disease. A postural habit is not unlike an addiction. Trying to live with better posture may cause more problems, or be more uncomfortable, than whatever it was that drove you to try to improve your posture in the first place.
If the only reason you want to change your posture is on principle, I don’t recommend it. It’s not worth the trouble. You are not a good candidate for this process. There are a hundred, a thousand more useful things you could do with your time.
However, if you are driven to the idea of postural transformation by aches and pains, you will certainly be more motivated, and the side-effects of a challenging new habit may be more tolerable. You should probably try it, you should keep it up for a while, to give it an adequate chance, and even just for the sake of experiment.
Try to stay interested in the challenge for an absolute minimum of one month. Watch and wait patiently for new developments. It took me six months to learn how to stop sleeping on my front … but now I can’t imagine going back. People who quit trying to change their posture after a week, or even after a month, have not learned much — except that they aren’t very good at it.
Be persistent and give it a fair chance.
And if the first honest attempt doesn’t work?
Give up.
What if you give postural change a fair chance, and there are no obvious benefits? What if you can’t really tell if you’ve achieved anything? What if you still seem to be crooked? Or what if you look straighter in the mirror, but it makes no difference to how you feel?
Definitely … give up.
I am all for trying anything once, and I think postural exercise is worth a shot if you think it might be connected to a pain problem. However, if a reasonable effort fails, I do not recommend a repeat performance. Once again, there are many better things you can do with your time — not just better things in general, but better things you can do to try to solve a pain problem.
There are simply too many problems, too many questions about posture’s relevance to pain. It’s worth trying to work with posture — but it’s not worth trying a lot.
How to change your posture
In this section, I will look at the general problem of how to change a posture. I will not prescribe specific postural exercises — once again, you can find those ideas in the shorter article, Posture Exercises for Posture Correction. You will notice a “no easy answers” theme throughout this section.
There is no right way to do this. Every person finds unique solutions to unique problems.
So how do you do it, if there is no “right” way?
There is no right way to change your posture; every person finds unique solutions to unique problems
Choosing a simple goal is an easy way to start. Most people have several obvious possibilities to select from. Since there is no sure way to know which goals are the most important, you are free to simply pick one that you like, and run with it. Here are some examples that have served my clients well:
- to inject some movement into a sedentary job
- to balance comfortably on one leg (coordination may be an important missing puzzle piece for some people)
- to be able to lower the shoulders smoothly (dysfunctional trapezius muscles tend to cause a rough, ratcheting movement on the way down from the ears)
- to walk more slowly
- to smile more (face posture is not insignificant)
- to breathe from the belly
- to flatten the low back
- to sleep on the side or back instead of the front of the body to hold the head high
Notice that only a few of these goals are about changing “positions”!
I have seen and tried dozens of specific “tactics” for changing postural habits. There are no rules, and there is no system to which you should devote your life. Any teacher or exercise philosophy is potentially useful, although you should bear in mind that their intuition and artistry may be more important to you than their technical skill. Here are a few examples of approaches that you could take …
- Take up a challenging new physical recreation. this can work postural miracles with minimal effort. A physical challenge like paddling (Dragon boating), for instance, absolutely forces you to learn how to use your upper body differently. The risk is that you will carry limiting postural dysfunction into the new activity. The potential benefit is that the enthusiasm you feel for the new activity will magically inspire new habits. Many people have permanently broken old habits by taking up an exciting new activity that required being different to enjoy or succeed at.
- Visualize, dramatize and role-play. These are powerful tactics for postural change. If you find it hard to lift your chest, lift your heart instead: walk down the street pretending to be three times more confident than you are (act “as if”) and watch what happens to your chest. If your back is uncomfortably curved (excessive lordosis), then “walk like a dinosaur” — pretend you have an enormous, heavy, swaying tail as you walk. And so on.
- Interrupt or remind yourself to pay attention to your goal using timers and buzzers or whatever works. This can be very useful for increasing body awareness. Ask a friend to call you at random throughout the week, asking you what you are doing with your feet (or whatever) at that moment. Similar tricks can be played with signs, alarms, or oddly placed objects around your home or office.
- Practice makes perfect. Some people find it simplest to just perform an exercise ritual — strive for your goal repeatedly or continuously until it gets easier. This is what’s required for most learning. If you need to carry your head further back, then go for a half hour walk every day and practice keeping your head in the “right” place.
- Props and apparatus can sometimes force the issue effectively. I don’t think that I ever would have learned to sleep on my side without the help of a pillow. To this day, I still need a pillow “in my way” to prevent me from rolling onto my stomach. Obviously, there is almost no limit to the creative possibilities here.
As potentially useful as all of these strategies are, I have my own personal favourites that I teach and practice myself. I will present those in the next section.
Strategies that I teach and practice
It’s time to preach what I practice.
What I will present here is just another postural exercise philosophy. They are a dime a dozen.
I start with an important assumption. I assume that we would all live in good posture, without discipline, if only we knew what it felt like, and had the strength to do it. Most of us do not know (or have forgotten) what it feels like, and do not have the strength. So I do everything I can to generate a felt experience of an effective posture. Once it is tasted, it cannot be put away: a positive cycle is initiated. The better your posture gets, the faster it gets better.
But “generating a felt experience of an effective posture,” is not so easily said, and it is even more difficult to do. Getting that first taste of goodness can be tricky. To pursue it, I have two broad strategies I recommend …
Increase awareness
We all possess an innate physical intelligence. It has been called the “wisdom of the body.” Phrased as a broad hypothesis, the idea is that the body “knows” how to heal and be healthy, but sometimes our great big mind gets in the way. Unlike other animals, humans engage in complex behaviours that may override the wisdom of the body. But with education and practice, we may be able to restore better, more “instinctive” habits.
My approach to postural exercise relies on this process. I do not know what good posture for you is, but you do — if only you could remember what it feels like. I can help people with that, and you can help yourself with it.
Your body “knows” how to heal and be healthy, but sometimes your great big mind gets in the way.
There are many ways to increase self-awareness, many ways to stimulate that innate physical intelligence. I practice and teach powerful breathing techniques that alter your state of being as much as an opiate drug. As a massage therapist, I can directly stimulate awareness of tissue in dozens of ways. By teaching a huge variety of exercises, my students get to experiment with many postures. I particularly focus on core concepts in several different ancient martial arts and exercise philosophies such as yoga, because I believe that these disciplines (or “inspirations,” as I think of them) contain a high proportion of interesting postures that help you “remember” how to use your postural reflexes.
This exposure to such a variety of experiences works for most people sooner or later. Eventually you will notice that a particular exercise, or type of exercise, feels much more pleasant than the others, or better in some sense. I have witnessed this process of discovery many times: that warm glow of recognition and satisfaction, as a person notices that something that once seemed like work now simply works for him. Like practicing a musical instrument, eventually you discover that something pleasant has become automatic, and then you can do something else — like sing at the same time as strumming.
Once body awareness is adequately stimulated, the rest often takes care of itself. As the years go by, I get much better at stimulating awareness, without learning nearly so much about posture itself.
There are many ways for you to stimulate physical intelligence in yourself, without the help of a teacher or therapist like myself. The key is a spirit of experimentation and an earnest curiosity about the sensations associated with everything that you do. If you do nothing else about posture, simply do something completely different than you usually do.
Variety is much more than the spice of life — it is the source of almost all opportunities to learn, to feel new things.
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Make it easier
One of the likely consequences of poor posture — muscle pain, stiffness, dysfunction — is also one of the largest barriers to stimulating self-awareness: a catch twenty-two.
In other words, pain and stiffness makes it difficult to feel the goodness in a good posture.
How are you supposed to recognize the good feeling of a good posture if the reflexes you need to get there are atrophied, and all your muscles are riddled with knots? It’s very difficult at first, maybe impossible. Good posture may not feel good until you are properly conditioned … and it can take a long time to condition musculature that you habitually do not use and have learned to hate to use.
Removing this barrier is another important part of my method of approaching postural change. If your muscles are a mess, then easy exercise and some massage therapy is probably an important component of your attempt to change your posture.
Good posture may not feel good until you are properly conditioned.
What to do when a good posture feels bad
As I explained at the beginning of this article, a bad posture is usually at the center of a comfort zone. When you leave the posture, you leave the comfort zone, and life can suddenly gets difficult. For this reason, good posture may feel bad — quite literally painful and unpleasant.
I have seen some serious initial reactions to postural exercise and attempts at good posture. For instance, alterations in joint mechanics associated with postural exercise might cause a nasty crick in the neck, resulting in a week of headaches and aggravation — and who needs that?.
Muscle soreness in the back might triple or quadruple when the region is first challenged to “stand up straight.”
In principle, this is not much different than getting sore legs after the first soccer game of the season, or overdoing it on the ski hill. But it is a bit nastier than that. With postural exercise, there is definitely a strong emotional component. Remember, in doing postural exercise, you have left that comfort zone, perhaps feeling driven to it by unpleasant circumstances in the first place — and then look what happened! Everything got even worse!
Most people rush back to the comfort zone, emotionally validated by the pain they experienced when they tried to leave.
This is somewhat worse than getting sore legs after the first soccer game of the season, or overdoing it on the ski hill.
What is happening is simple: you aren’t ready to enjoy a good posture yet. Your muscles — your entire nervous system — is not yet conditioned for it. Your muscles probably need to be quite a bit healthier. Getting them there takes time and effort.
The general solution is awareness, a slower and more gentle approach, and more physical conditioning. If postural exercise really gets you down, you are rushing it. You need to understand that you are not quite ready, and why you are not quite ready. Then you need to get to work on getting ready.
All of this may seem a little random and haphazard. It is.
Good luck, and follow your heart.
