There are three major flaws in your posture that cannot be overlooked. When you have them, you are at negative one. Not at the beginning of your posture journey, you are… not yet even ready to begin. You have to fix these things before you can even begin.
What brings any of us to a point where we are compelled to read an article about posture?
So instead of reading another article, why not just sit up straight?
If only it were that simple. But before we even begin to discuss what good posture looks like, we must address three major flaws in your posture that cannot be overlooked. When you have any of these flaws, in our posture scoreboard, you are at a negative. You are not ready to even begin your posture journey because you can’t get to the starting line. To get to the starting line, you have to fix:
‘The Push Forward’
‘The Lean Back’
‘The Middle Malady’
In this important article in a series, let’s discuss the importance of beginning correctly.
The Push forward
Sometimes, but too often, I will ask someone to stand with good posture while evaluating them in my office. They will lock their knees and push their pelvis forward as they assume an all too comfortable position for them. One that reveals the truth that they stand this way all the time. It is a posture that I frequently see while people are standing in line or at Mass. With my patients, the evaluation stops there. We can’t even move forward until this is fixed. And it is not an easy fix because they have been doing this their whole lives.
“You have to start working on this today” I tell them.
“But I have been standing this way my whole life” they tell me.
“But you didn’t have pain your whole life” I tell them.
Sure, you could stand that way before, when you were building the stability/coordination foundation, or you could stand that way when your Body Guitar was in tune. But now you are out of tune. To get you in tune, we need to fix the balance between Bracing muscles and String muscles and stay there for the rest of your life. That means… you can’t stand like this anymore.
Ever.
Whether this means starting physical therapy to get there (although we need them for many other things and we don’t want to use up the visits) or just being diligent and powering through to a result, fix it.
The Lean Back
This position is extraordinarily more common. I see this in almost every 50+ mildly overweight adult.
Author included.
This is when you have a head that leans a little more forward than you would like, and instead of fixing this, you arch your back to get your head in a better spot. This, of course, puts you back on your heels, butt cheeks clamped. A bad spot to start from in our posture journey.
You know you are here when your sternum (the bone in the center of your chest) is not perpendicular to the floor. Patients will have often been in this position for decades, and when I get them in the correct position, they are convinced that this can’t be right. They feel like they are leaning forward and that their head is jutted forward.
They are correct: their head is too far forward, which is why they were arching their back. They need to work on flexibility in their neck. Otherwise, they aren’t leaning forward; they are on their midfoot when they have spent years on their heels. It feels off. Unusual. But it can be learned in a week or two. Yet it has to be done.
So get started. Bracing spine illustration
The Middle Malady
This one has already been addressed in another series, but I bring it up again as I will in almost every article in this series.
You have to get your diaphragm moving when you breathe.
This is a non-negotiable. We are trying to use posture to either fix your back pain or stave off aging. In both of these cases, you will chest breathe as the String muscles either are the dominant stability muscles or are trying to become them.
To maintain our uniquely human stability, these muscles must be in balance with a slight dominance of the Bracing muscles. To regain or retain this dominance, you have to spend more time building strength in these Bracing muscles. The easiest way to do that is with good posture. But good posture with chest breathing is an oxymoron.
If your diaphragm is locked, you are overusing your String muscles and your Bracing muscles are inhibited. Every measurable in your posture could be perfect and you are still losing the battle. Posture is not just about the positions. It is about using the correct muscles while in the correct positions, and you can’t do that if you are chest-breathing.
Does this mean that you always have to breathe with your diaphragm? No, we need to stabilize our spine in many different ways throughout the day. Some of these include chest breathing, some include bearing down, and others are a balance of all of these ways. But when we are working on posture or our physical therapy exercises, we need to be abdominal (diaphragmatic) breathing.
Seek Out A Professional To Assist
These concepts and instructions can be difficult to understand by just reading an article or seeing pictures. As you will see in the next article about posture and the stability gap, you have more to fix than just these three problems. You are going to need to see a professional at some point anyway. Posture is just too important. And it’s individual. An article does not address all the many nuances that patients present with. You are not a Rubik’s Cube that is solved the same way every time. The complexities of posture, flexibility, and gait (how you walk) are much more complicated, and you deserve an evaluation.
But show up already working on these 3 flaws.