fbpx

Posture

Body Science

The only bad posture is one you stay in for too long. We are dynamic beings and our bodies adapt to the forces we place on them. The health and fitness community has spent way too much time blaming poor posture for every ache and pain we experience, when in fact posture or structural abnormalities are common, and it is not abnormal at all to see what we qualify as poor posture in perfectly healthy people who have no complaints about pain or discomfort. Your bony structure at birth was not the same as the bony structure of the guy next to you. Add to that the fact that the forces you have placed on your body throughout your lifetime of physical activities or inactivity are unique to you, and your body has adapted to be strong and robust where you have taught it to be, and it means that you may look a little different from your best friends or family members. Remember that bones are living tissues, forever breaking down and rebuilding themselves; adapting to be your very own unique skeleton.

This is not to say that posture doesn’t matter at all, especially when lifting heavy weights or doing dynamic exercises. It also doesn’t mean we should abandon looking at posture all together in terms of clinical assessment, but instead maybe we just need to look at it a little differently. We need to be mindful of posture during fitness for the sake of preventing injury. A clinician seeing postural ‘abnormalities’ may offer some insight into some aches and pain, as well as offer information about which muscles or muscle groups are working way too hard, compared to those that we aren’t working enough. But perhaps instead of beating ourselves up for our persistent bad posture, we simply need to incorporate more exercise or movement into our day that counter the bad positions we frequently find ourselves in. We are dynamic beings. We are meant to move.

There was a time that I did a postural assessment on every new patient that came into my clinic. I don’t recall the last time I saw someone who didn’t have internally rotated shoulders and a head forward posture; you know that posture that’s lovingly referred to on the Internet as ‘text neck’ (that’s not a thing, by the way)! As a result of these extremely common postural observations, one of my favorite go-to homecare exercises to give patients is simply having them pull their shoulder blades together and down, as if they were squeezing a pen between the shoulder blades, raising their arms out to the side at shoulder height, and creating little tiny circles with their arms. By doing this, we are simply moving into the exact opposite position they so comfortably and mindlessly spend so much of their time in. In moving the arms in tiny circles, we are strengthening the muscles that help oppose the ‘bad posture’ observed. Try this for yourself. If you find it’s difficult, it’s probably because it’s good for you.

Related articles

54 COMMENTS

Comments are closed.

What are you waiting for?

Conact Me