My Problem with “Posture”

Good posture is more about how you move than how you keep still. 

During my early twenties posture was a nagging concern for me. One of my grannies had osteoporosis and a noticeable hump and the general postural tendency in my family is towards a rounded shoulder outline. My other granny, who was blessed with naturally good posture and steel hard bones, would swear her secret had been walking around with a broomstick across her back during her adolescence and reminding herself to “roll her shoulders up back and down” to keep her back straight. My sister, who in her teenage years showed early signs of slouching, was constantly reminded to stand straight and keep her shoulders back. She even had an elastic-harness-strapping-thingy that promised to train her muscles into holding correct posture.

With this background, it isn’t surprising that I grew up believing good posture is something you have to hold on to, an ideal form to keep and train your muscles into. When in my early twenties I started seeing signs of my own postural deterioration, I also bought myself one of the harness contraptions and would try to wear it during work hours, strapped on as tight as I could (the tighter the better, right?). It was horribly uncomfortable, painful even; it would leave me with incredibly sore shoulders and neck. But the most disheartening thing was that the minute I took off the torture device, my shoulders would invariably slump forward, aching but grateful that the day’s ordeal was over. In other words, my posture would fall apart the minute I wasn’t strapping it into its “correct” position.

This view of what good posture is, and how to acquire and maintain one, is fairly mainstream. A quick Google search for “posture exercises” will throw results that speak to this idea: which muscles need to be strengthened to hold you upright (mostly core work, i.e. abdominal and back muscles) and which need to be lengthened from their chronically shortened conditions (namely muscles which attach your limbs to your trunk, like the pectorals, the psoas and the hamstrings).

I hold no issue against these exercises, for I still believe that the relative length and strength of certain muscle groups does play an important role in so called “good” posture. However, I do have an issue with the model of posture that is behind them.

From a somatic movement perspective “posture” (as the term is generally understood) is an irrelevant concept, hence it makes no sense to hold on to neither the term itself nor any physical posture whatsoever. The word posture (linked etymologically to the word post) implies something static, and life is everything but that.  When you admire someone’s “good posture” what you are really admiring is their “poise”, their “alignment”, their capacity to adapt to constantly changing demands for balance and counterbalance, in such a way that there is a relative “quietness” of visible effort in their bodies. This “quietness” of unnecessary effort, this efficient play of equilibriums, is what “good posture” is actually all about: an “attitude” more than a “shape”.

The main problem with our understanding of what posture is, is thinking it has anything to do with a set form, “set” being the key word here. We are always moving, even when we think we are standing, sitting or lying motionless. Think of it, even when we are completely “still” we are still breathing, and that is already a form of movement that requires adaptations in the relative position of certain bones (ribs), muscles (diaphragm) and organs (lungs) which in turn cause adaptations in all other bones, muscles and organs. When we are standing still, we are balancing upright against the pull of gravity on a structure that is most decidedly not a post. As we can see, maintaining the illusion of “good posture” is more a question of managing the dynamic equilibrium of perpetually moving parts that keep realigning themselves to adapt to constantly changing inner and outer environments, than of keeping certain bits of our anatomy in a fixed position (shoulders back and down!).

Posture is a dance, full of improvisations, micro and macro adjustments of tone and direction. Since all our parts need to be ever ready to move in relation to our other parts, trying to maintain a fixed “posture” is nothing but interference with the action of living (at the very least of breathing).

For example, when I was strapping my shoulders back and down with the harness I was interfering not only with my breathing, but also with my walking. My shoulder blades need to move as I walk, both as part of the rotation of my trunk and the back and forth swing of my arms. By fixing my shoulders firmly back I was disturbing the natural movement of my arms and the rotation and counter rotation that should occur between my shoulder girdle and pelvis as I walk. This in turn unbalanced my spine and anything that unbalances your spine automatically increases the overall effort you need to exert just to shift weight from one leg to another in order to walk. Needless to say, if you unbalance your spine, you unbalance your-Self, for few things are more terrifying to your system than the possibility of losing your balance and ending up with your head smacking against the floor.

In a nutshell, the whole stand up straight, shoulders back, chest out, butt in directives are not only ineffective in correcting posture, they also causes problems when the time comes to actually move (which is all the time). So, instead of trying to maintain good posture, why not ask yourself whether everything is moving with ease?

How can you know that? Well, I think the key is in learning two things. The first is learning a little about how you are built for movement, have some basic idea of what your inner structures look like and what movement possibilities they have. The second is learning to tune into your movement quality, to how your body feels when it moves (does this movement feel easy, elegant and graceful, or painful, stiff and forced?). Putting these two things together is the surer path I know to finally acquiring and constantly updating your posture.