Posture

“Bring the spoon to your mouth, not your mouth to the spoon,” my grandmother would scream in an effort to get me to sit up straight at the dinner table. To her, my posture was not only a danger to my own health but an affront to her values, a sign of ignorance and bad manners. She was born into the very heart of the posture wars.

Posture has become a buzzword, a catch-all for all problems: kyphosis, lordosis, scoliosis. These terms sound terrifying, but do they need to be? This essay does not aim to dismiss the entire concept of posture or give you an easy no context answer to 'fixing' posture, sorry for the click bait.  Instead, it is to challenge the entrenched belief that there is such a thing as perfect posture and to suggest that we need not panic about it.

History

The history of posture is quite insidious. With military roots in the 1600s, the concept of standing tall and stiff was promoted as a means of distinguishing class and, more disgustingly, race. The further away you were from the ground, the more evolved you were considered. The racial ties to eugenics and social hierarchy, reached a terrifying peak with the Fascist movement toward race supremacy in the 1930s.

Since then, posture has thankfully become less of a critical issue. Men's clothes are no longer made of stiff fabric that makes bending difficult. Women don't feel the same pressure to wear corsets designed to turn them into iron rods. Furniture has become softer, and lounging is more acceptable in public settings.

However, posture still holds significant power when it comes to movement, exercise, pain, and physical therapy. We are still flooded with fear-mongering articles like "6 Effects of Poor Posture on the Body" or "3 Surprising Risks of Poor Posture". While places like Harvard and the Hospital for Special Surgery are surely well-meaning, disseminating contextually devoid content like this only contributes to movement fear rather than helping people understand and connect to movement.

Pain and Posture

When we think of painful posture, we think of a slouched position, backbreaking labor, men and women hunched over in fields, mines, or at their computer desks. It makes sense that we equate pain with these postures. But bending the spine is not a problem. Spines are meant to bend, extend, twist, and turn. The problem is being in one position for hours on end.

Our bodies are incredible. In an ingenious way to reduce energy consumption, our bodies become incredibly efficient at the things we do all the time and disregard things we don't. For example we have become incredible at sitting and terrible at climbing.

Soft tissue injuries generally occur when the load placed on the tissue exceeds its capacity to handle that load.  With specialization of movement comes potential for injuries once we are exposed to movements outside specialization. Neglecting other movement patterns can get to a point that even just moving into unfamiliar positions can cause injury.

We may also experience pain without injury. As ridiculous as that sounds, the latest research does not prove that ALL pain means injury. Often, the aches and pains you might experience holding a posture for a long time are your body's requests for change. You know those Fitbits that buzz every 40 minutes reminding you to move? Well, your body does that for free. But like an escalating morning alarm clock, if you ignore the subtle prompts, the eventual notification to get up and move will be obnoxious and intolerable.

So, while pain and posture can have correlation the causation is likely not what you think.

Positives of Posture Training

Although the notion of good posture is intrinsically linked to eugenics and racism, it's also tied with a recognition of our own mortality. The taller we are, the further away we are from the ground. So training to prolong the fulfillment of our ultimate destiny as worm food is not a bad thing.

In general, slouched positions are more passive. They don't require as much muscular effort. These positions are best for when we are sprawled on the ground, sitting against a rock, or lounging on a couch. Let the external support do the work against gravity. However, when we don't have that support, we need to be active. We need our muscles to be internal support. Strength training helps us do this. It strengthens the muscles, which keep our bones moving and create space in our joints. This ultimately helps us in our sole objective as a species: punching gravity in the face for as long as possible.

So what is it about. 

Posture training, like all training, should really be about awareness, options, and choice. Am I aware of the position I am in? Do I have the option to be in another position? Am I engaged in the choice of posture I have taken?

Being aware of where your body lies in space is called proprioception. The more we work on building our awareness around movement, the more we will see where we have options and where we are limited. Personally, my upper spine loves flexion and is not a huge fan of extension. This doesn't cause me any issues, but it does mean I have to work a little harder to do things that call for a tall upper back. It also means if I were to pay no attention to it now, I would have even fewer options in the future.

In order to maintain options in movement, I have to train in places that my body doesn't inherently like to go. I must work to spend time in extension and make sure I maintain the proprioceptive connection to that space. Otherwise, my body, in its brilliant capacity for efficiency, will completely disregard that aspect of movement. 

Which leads us to choice. If I have the awareness and the option to hold or explore a certain posture, then I can start to make choices around what feels better. Earlier I mentioned that pain can be a request for change. The more awareness and options I develop, the more choice I have when it comes to holding a posture or changing it. This can sound esoteric and complicated but it’s not. Learning to do basic movement patterns with the intention of building sensation, strength and mobility is all you need to do.

Wrap-Up

Strength training is posture training, but it does not mean that by doing it we will all end up conforming to a plumb line ideal of what “good posture” is. 

Chasing the holy grail of perfect posture is like chasing the perfect physique. It's a mirage, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that doesn’t exist. While you can read all about the best exercises for perfect posture, by doing the basics really well you can rest secure in the knowledge that you are doing enough. You are building your strength, your mobility and ultimately your options because "the perfect posture is the posture you are not in.”