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, but you are… not yet even ready to begin. You must fix these things before you can even begin.
What brings any of us to a point where we’re compelled to read an article about posture?
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. If you have any of these flaws, in this posture scoreboard, you’re at a negative. You’re not ready to begin your posture journey because you can’t even reach 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, when I ask someone to stand with good posture during an evaluation in my office, they’ll lock their knees and push their pelvis forward, settling into an all-too-comfortable position for them. One that reveals the truth that they stand this way all the time. I frequently see this posture in people standing in line or at Mass. With my patients, the evaluation stops right there. We can’t move forward until this is fixed, and it’s not an easy fix because they’ve been doing it their whole lives.
“You have to start working on this today,” I tell them.
“But I’ve been standing this way my whole life,” they reply.
“But you didn’t have pain your whole life” I counter.
Sure, you could stand that way before, when you were building the stability and coordination foundation, or you could stand that way when your Body Guitar was in tune. But now you’re out of tune. To get you back in tune, we need to restore the balance between your Bracing muscles and String muscles and maintain it for the rest of your life. That means… you can’t stand like this anymore.
Ever.
Whether this requires starting physical therapy to get there (though we need PT 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.
In the Bracing muscles of the lumbar spine is a muscle called the Transverse Abdominis. This muscle is deep to your core muscles and wraps front to back like a girdle. As a Bracing muscle, it’s a high-tone, endurance muscle that is contracting in a parasympathetic state. Along with the other Bracing muscles, it creates effortless stability when you’re relaxed. When this muscle weakens, several things become more apparent. We start looking more bloated, even if we are not. And, this is important to posture, we begin to arch our lower back, over-relying on the other Bracing muscles (multifidus and spinae erectors) more. This, of course, puts you back on your heels, a bad spot to start from in our posture journey.
You know you’re in this position when your sternum (the bone in the center of your chest) is not perpendicular to the floor. If you had a chest light like Iron Man, it would shine up toward the top of the wall near the ceiling rather than straight ahead. This stance also hides the fact that your head is too far forward.
To fix this position, we need to learn to contract this muscle consistently. Many people suggest pulling your pelvis under you, but I believe you can get there without doing that. Instead, focus on a subtle pull/contraction from the front top of your pelvis to the base of your ribs. Enough of a contraction to pull your sternum level. That’s it. But when I say that, realize that this is an endurance muscle, and endurance muscles take six months or more to regain the strength needed to maintain contraction throughout the day. I don’t expect you to hold this contraction your whole life, but this contraction increases blood flow to these red muscles, blood flow which eventually leads to effortless contraction. This thoughtless contraction balances out the other Bracing muscles and improves stability.
It sounds easy, but it’s not. Because in reality, it’s much more complicated than what I’ve described.
For some, the transverse abdominis is too tight, not in the whole muscle, but in parts of it. Others hinge at the wrong vertebrae or have weak obliques contributing to the problem. Anyone that has been in this position for long has a distorted sense of what “straight” feels like; when we get them aligned, their first words are often “this can’t be right”.
Many will read this and start to try to fix themselves. Believe me when I say that you’re probably going to need a professional. So get started. Bracing spine illustration
The Middle Malady
This one has already been addressed in another series, but I’ll 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. Whether you are trying to use posture to either help your back pain or stave off aging. In both of these cases, if you mostly chest breathe, your String muscles either are the dominant stability muscles or are becoming dominant.
To maintain our uniquely human stability, these muscles must be in balance with the Bracing muscles. To regain or retain this balance, 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 aspect of your posture could be perfect, and you are still losing the battle. Posture is not just about the positions, it’s about using the correct muscles while in those correct positions, and you can’t do that if you’re chest-breathing.
Does this mean that you always have to breathe with your diaphragm? No, we need to stabilize our spine in various 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, you need to be abdominal (diaphragmatic) breathing. When trying to fix the Push Forward or the Lean Back, you are going to catch yourself chest breathing and with butt cheeks clenched. That is not helping. Instead, breathe with your diaphragm, relax your butt and settle into your mid-foot.
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.