Got A Posture Problem?
If You Think Good Posture Involves Hard Work And Exercise, Read On...

Here are a few of the articles I have written about posture over the last ten years.

If you have any questions about the content please email me at roy@fitness-programs-for-life.com
and enter 'posture' in the subject line.

You Cannot Improve Your Posture By Trying Harder.

Habits And Poor Posture.

What Is Good Posture?

What Can I Do About My Bad Posture?


You Cannot Improve Your Posture By Trying Harder.

Do you have a posture problem? Have you tried a course of posture exercises to correct it? Most people would say they feel their posture could be better but why does it become poor and what is the best way to improve it?

Modern living means we probably are not as active as previous generations. We spend long hours sitting at desks, in cars or when relaxing, slumping in front of the TV. In these situations you are not using your muscles as nature originally intended. Parts of your body get overworked such as your neck and shoulders whilst others will get weaker, invariably the lower back. Poor posture has been recognized as a factor in health for many years resulting in the development of posture exercises to correct it. However, this approach may be misguided as the focus on specific muscles for improving posture could affect your body's natural support reflexes.

Your body has built-in postural reflexes to coordinate muscular activity for support and movement. If your posture has deteriorated it is likely these reflexes are not being allowed to work properly. Stress may be causing you to stiffen your neck and tighten your shoulders. These actions will override your natural mechanisms for balance and movement. Constant inappropriate use of these muscles will eventually corrupt how you move. It becomes a catch-22 problem. The more you move in a poor way, the better you get at moving this way until it feels right. Whilst I appreciate the popularity of exercises to improve posture, including core stability routines, I believe they result in unnecessary tension in the body. Should we have to work core muscles individually to get our body to stand tall? Did nature intend this as the best way to stand?

In my role as a teacher of The Alexander Technique I see many people who suffer as a result of poor posture. I also see just as many who are suffering as a result of their attempts to correct it! Adding a little extra tension in order to stand “properly” will not improve your posture - it just adds to the strain on your muscles and joints. Rather than trying to stand and sit in a way you feel is correct, you can learn how to remove the unnecessary stress in your body and allow your postural reflexes to work as nature intended. So forget about posture and learn about Poise.

Poise is a lost skill from our youth. When you have poise you use far less effort and your body will support itself with ease allowing you to move, breathe and function more freely. Poise is evident in top athletes and performers. Think of Muhammad Ali or Fred Astaire in their prime and that gives you a great example of freedom in movement. I doubt if they used exercises to improve their posture!

Poise can only be regained by first taking out the tension in your body and appreciating the push you get from the ground. When you are on top of the world and walk with a spring in your step, you are poised. When you can sit at your desk and feel no tension in your neck, shoulders and back – you are poised. Trying to improve your posture by trying harder will take you further away from your natural poised state. So don’t try – let whatever is beneath you push up and think of letting go to sit, stand and walk taller and you will be on your way to a return to poise.

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Habits And Poor Posture.

Habit influences everything you do. How you stand, sit, breathe and even think. If you have a posture problem it is probably due to your habits. But are you aware of their total influence on your actions? Try the following experiment.

1.  Fold your arms and note the position of your hands and which arm is on the outside.

2.  Now unfold them and fold them again but this time the opposite way.
     Note your reaction to how this feels.

Does it feel odd or even wrong? In the first step you used your habitual ‘folding the arms’ pattern. You did not have to think about how you did it because you have an existing pattern; it’s automatic and feels right. Did you have to think for a moment before carrying out the second instruction? It may even have taken several attempts to achieve. This is because you do not have an existing pattern for this movement and it has to be consciously worked out. It will probably feel wrong because you will not have done it like this before so the sensations from the muscles and joints will be new to you.

The important lesson from this experiment is how the two positions feel. Your habitual pattern feels right and is easy to do, your non-habitual opposite way feels wrong and is not quite so easy to do. There is obviously nothing wrong with the opposite arm-fold but that is exactly how it will feel. Would you normally choose to fold your arms in this manner? What feels right and wrong is therefore determined by habits that may be working for you but also against you.

So familiar feels right, unfamiliar feels wrong. There would have been a time when you didn’t fold you arms and you learnt by watching others do it. The important point is that you will have learnt to fold them in a particular way with either left or right arm on the outside. If you have never folded them the other way around you will never choose to do it this way and probably never cross your mind that it could be done another way. Whichever way you do it first you are likely to become stuck with it; it’s your habit for life.

Folding your arms in the same way continues to re-enforce the feeling of rightness whilst creating the set of ‘rules’ for this pattern you will always follow.

Now what about how you stand, sit and walk, your basic actions that you spend every day performing? Why should these actions be exempt from the ‘rules’ that apply to your arm-folding habit? Of course they are not.

So how you sit at your desk is done in a way you have learnt to do it and it will feel right. There are many ways to sit but would you ever try these out? If you do, how do they feel? Can you maintain your new sitting position for long? People can soon become uncomfortable as they use new muscles for sitting that are normally inactive for sitting.

So in effect we all create our own unique bubble to exist in but we can’t see it because we are in it. To the snowman inside his dome the weather never appears to change! If you develop poor habits relating to movement how would you know? Neck, back and shoulder pain are the most obvious symptoms but how can you accurately identify the cause when the fault lies with the very equipment you would use to diagnose and correct it?

Never performing to your full potential is a less obvious symptom simply because if you haven’t been there how do you know if you are underachieving?

So when you try to change your posture, don’t do what feels right! Yes this does sound a little odd, but remember what feels right is down to your habits: the ones causing the problem! To successfully change a habit, any habit, you will have to go into the unknown – the feeling you had when folding your arms the opposite way. This is the only way you can be sure you are not engaging your old, poor habits.

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What Is Good Posture?

Good posture, we are always being told, is good for your health, great for your image and will prevent many aches, pains and sporting injuries.

But what is it? How do you define it? And how do you get it?

How many times were you told as a child to sit up straight, don’t slouch or to stand tall? How many times as a parent have you said it to your children? Whilst the intention may be good, the instruction is misleading and could be the cause of many problems including lower back pain and, ironically poor posture!

When you were told to sit up what did you do? The majority will tighten the lower back and push the chest forward, yet if you look at the back it is not sitting straight – its pulling the lower back in and shortening the spine. It also instils the belief that if you are doing something wrong, such as slouching, you need to do something extra to correct it rather than to just stop slumping. The tension you apply to carry out these instructions will soon become habitual until excessive effort and tension is applied to all your actions

Posture has long been considered important, even our language recognises its desirability. We may refer to someone who is trustworthy as being upright or a pillar of the community, whereas spineless tells us the opposite. The recognition to the importance of posture has resulted in many exercises and corrective programs to achieve it. However, I believe exercise is not the way to get a good shape. Let's get one thing clear. Good posture is NOT about standing or sitting up straight. This is just tightening your back and leg muscles and forcing yourself into a rigid position. Search the internet for advice for attaining a good posture and you will find all the wrong instructions such as chin in, shoulders back, chest out. Following this advice will lead to excessive muscular effort and unnecessary strain on your bones and joints.

So how do we get good posture?

This is the million dollar question, and the answer is by not trying! Okay, this does sound a little odd but it is perfectly true. If you knew what good posture was, you would already have it. So if you haven’t got a good posture you obviously don’t know what it is and how it should be achieved. I know this sounds tough but I had to learn the same lesson. Therefore, it is not a good idea to try and guess which position you suspect to be right.

The secret to achieving a good posture is to let go of the tension in your body that is pulling you out of shape. This will allow your innate postural reflexes to work unimpeded and bring your body into a state of poise that you possessed in your youth. However, you can go too far and end up collapsing into a heap. Your body does need tension to keep you upright but this should be controlled by your nervous system and not by you directly.

To make a start, try to become aware of what is supporting you and allow the surface beneath you to ‘push’ back up. Your reflexes respond to the pull of gravity in relation to your position. If you can release tension and be aware of this ‘push’ you may start to find you can let go a little and start to appreciate what poise feels like.

It is not an easy process initially because you will have developed habits that include unnecessary muscular actions. Re-education is essential to begin to break these bad postural habits. Perhaps the best-known and effective system for this process is The Alexander Technique. This 100 year-old system is, in a way, still ahead of its time as recognising the importance of habits and body concept as influential players in posture. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results and find many applications for this simple, yet remarkable technique.

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What Can I Do About My Bad Posture?

Has your partner or close friend ever commented on your posture? I guess you weren’t too happy to hear this because it feels like a judgement on your total character. What first impression do you form of a stranger with poor posture? Do you feel you can trust this person? Are they strong, dependable or honest? If someone close to you thinks you have bad posture; what assumptions are other people you come in contact with making?

However, you should not feel in a minority. If you randomly ask one hundred adults about how they feel about their posture, I would bet my house that over seventy-five would say theirs was bad. And almost everyone of one them would make an effort to stand a little straighter when asked.

Now here is an interesting observation. We assume that to correct bad posture all we have to do is to stand or sit straighter, or in other words, do something with a bit more effort and all is well. Once we have made this effort we are confident our posture is again right – whilst we remember to do it. Now, surely if we knew what good posture was we would already have it!

From this experience can we not deduce that if we have poor posture we are doing something that is causing it? And therefore to correct bad posture we have to stop doing whatever it is that isn’t helping. As a teacher of The Alexander Technique I find that most adults are ‘pulling down’, that is they are tightening muscles they don’t need to be using with the affect that it pulls part of their body towards the ground. Other muscles then need to resist this pull down to keep us upright. When we try to correct our poor posture by ‘doing something’, such as trying to stand straight, we do it by tightening the muscles already struggling against the other muscles pulling down. This leads to even more tension in the body.

Popular exercises to correct poor posture will actually make your problem worse as they re-enforce the poor habit of using too much effort. Your muscles work in a totally integrated way and should not be developed individually in an attempt to correct a problem with the whole body.

Check your body now. Are you pulling yourself down into your chair? Can you get a sense of the chair underneath you and let it push you up. If you think you have poor posture check what you are already doing that is pulling you out of shape. When you can stop doing this your body will be allowed to assume it’s natural, effortless upright posture.

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Copyright 2006 Roy Palmer Got A Posture Problem?