How To Improve Your Posture: The Importance of Posture and How To Really Change It

Introduction

The signs of bad posture are all around us. You may have justifiably picked up this book because you don’t like the way you look. You might look in the mirror and not like what you see. You may look slouched, collapsed or hunched over. There might be a glitch in the way you walk or stand that bothers you. You might be tilting to one side or the other. Or you might even be beginning to look old or like your parents or grandparents long before you think you should.

Like it or not, we are both judged and judge others by their posture. Those with more erect posture are perceived as happier, more confident, more in control and more effectual. Older people with good posture are perceived as younger.

But posture is more than just something that looks pretty, and this where this book differs from so many others. While most people know that posture involves appearance, fewer are aware that our posture or body alignment is also intimately connected to function, with what we can or cannot physically do. When our posture or alignment is out of whack, we often find ourselves unable to do things we used to do, or they become harder to do, or we become less inclined to do them. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable or it’s simply no fun anymore. Bad posture might cause us to give up sports and activities we love long before we really need to. Or we might find that it’s becoming harder just to do all the movements involved in day-to-day living. This could be due to our posture or body alignment being off.

Bad posture also causes or contributes to a great deal of the muscle and joint pain and disability that affects so many at younger and younger ages. Some of you may have been through a long progression of doctors, healthcare providers or exercise programs. No one seems to know what’s going on; nothing seems to help. As a physician, over a number of years I’ve come to believe that a great deal of our muscle and joint injuries and problems—including the current epidemic of neck pain, back pain, carpal tunnel, rotator cuff disorders, knee and ankle disorders—have their root cause in our loss of alignment. When our posture is off, when our joints and muscles are out of alignment, it causes increased strain in parts of the body not designed for it. Often when we see doctors, or take pills to cover up the pain, the underlying problem, faulty body alignment, is never addressed and, hence, the real cause of many of our problems is never remedied. Again, if you are in pain due to posture problems, this book can help.

To be fair, many people know their posture is off and want to fix it but don’t know exactly how to do it. You might read a magazine article on posture and decide to pull your shoulders back for a few days, or sit up straight in your chair at work. But it doesn’t help, does it?

You might have also noticed that simply exercising usually can’t fix posture problems. In fact, often unless we do something to correct our alignment first, exercise may reinforce or perpetuate any posture problems we might have. There is a knack to fixing or correcting our posture and most of us aren’t aware of it.

The first few chapters of this book present the principles of posture and body alignment. There is also an emphasis on the importance of movement in our lives, particularly as we grow older, since this is intimately connected with maintaining our posture. I’ve purposely avoided the game of muscle-naming and scientific jargon. The principles underlying the function of our muscles, joints, and alignment are simple and can be understood by a child. Numerous illustrations throughout the book make these basic concepts fun and simple to understand.

Following this is a self-assessment where you get to take a close individual look at your own posture, to find any areas where your particular posture might need help. Then exercises are prescribed in menus to help correct specific alterations in posture. If your back or shoulders are rounded forward, there are exercises to correct that. If one hip or shoulder is higher than the other, there are exercises that can help. Many of the exercises are different from ones you might be used to. The goal of the exercises isn’t to run you through your paces, but rather to slowly, gradually correct areas of stiffness and weakness and bring your body back into alignment. This will take some effort on your part. There is no magic cure for posture.

And while I don’t claim the exercises in this book will absolutely, positively correct any and all posture abnormalities (for many people, they will), I do claim when done properly they will move anyone strongly in the direction of correct postural alignment. They are powerful tools. Your posture will improve markedly. You will look and feel better. You will move better.

The last chapter of the book presents some new alternative ways of thinking to help maintain posture and function as we grow older.

Finally, improving your posture isn’t an all or nothing proposition. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are, or what your posture is like. Anything you can do to improve your body’s alignment, even in a small way, is worthwhile. A small correction in your alignment can make you look and feel years younger. A little correction in your alignment may be enough to get rid of a pain that has been bothering you for years. Improving your posture may allow you to keep doing activities you might otherwise have to give up.

So let’s get started.

Chapter 1

The Problem

Just look around. We’ve become a nation of walking wounded. We slouch, we waddle, we sag. We collapse into our chairs and hunch over our desks and computers. More and more of us are looking crooked, rounded, and just generally out-of-line at earlier and earlier ages. The signs of bad posture are all around us, and it hurts us and is killing us.

Posture or body alignment refers to the way we stand, sit, move and hold and control our bodies in space. Posture’s most obvious manifestation is our appearance. Do we stand upright, or are we slumped or rounded forward? Are we crooked or chronically leaning to one side? Is one shoulder more forward than the other? Is there too much or too little curve in our low back? When we sit, are we chronically slumped and slouched over? When we walk or move, is our movement balanced or is it discordant?

We all have a sense of what ideal or good posture is. We often see it in our favorite actors, actresses and sports stars, or in certain leaders, or even people at work or school. And whether we like it or not, we are both judged and judge others based on posture. In fact, it’s part of our biological heritage to judge each other by our appearance, which includes posture. One might say it’s a short cut (not always accurate) in accessing a person’s stature in the tribe.

People with good posture are generally seen as more healthy, confident, effective and vibrant. Older people with correct posture are perceived as younger, while those with so-called bad posture are often seen as older beyond their years, weak, faltering, disabled or ineffectual.

Our mothers were right too. They may not have been exactly right on how to correct our posture— there’s more to it than just pulling our shoulders back—but they were right on the benefits. With good posture, not only do others often perceive us in a more positive light, but also we tend to feel better about ourselves. With good posture, we ourselves tend to feel more confident, happy and effectual. We emotionally feel better. In fact, when we are at our best, we tend to naturally stand more upright and aligned.

You may have justifiably picked up this book because of posture’s effects on your appearance—because of the way you look, or rather because you don’t like the way you look. But there is more to posture than just appearance.

A lesser-known aspect of posture is that it also affects our physical functioning, what we are able or not able to comfortably do. There is an optimal alignment for our bodies and when we deviate from that, our bodies don’t work as smoothly or as efficiently as they could. When our posture or body alignment becomes off, it is no longer as easy to do all the things we want or need to do, whether it involves our work, school, sports or just day-to-day living.

Finally, a third aspect of posture is that alterations in our posture directly cause or contribute to muscle and joint pain and disability. When our posture is out of whack, when our body deviates from its optimal alignment, increased stress and strain is being put on parts of our body not designed to handle those forces. We start to hurt. When we’re tilted or crooked, it can hurt in our necks, backs, hips, sides, shoulders, arms, legs or feet—anywhere. Over time, if these alterations in posture are not addressed, it can lead not only to more pain but also to disability. Aberrant forces on our muscles and joints can physically damage them and limit our ability to move.

These three aspects of posture—appearance, function and muscle and joint pain and disability—all overlap and are the reasons posture is important.

My Story

What caused me to become interested in posture?

One day during my years working as an Emergency Room physician, one of the nurses I worked with mentioned how slumped my posture had become. Actually she said my posture was horrid! I slumped or as she said schlepped my way around the department. She said my shoulders were rounded forward, and I had a tilt to my pelvis so that I listed to one side almost like a sailor walking on a pitching deck.

Of course, when I checked myself out in a mirror that night, I saw no problem. Like everyone does when checking posture, I immediately pulled myself into an upright, soldier-like position to check. No problem. I looked pretty good. But of course, when I was finally forced to relax and stand in my ‘normal’ posture, things did look off. I looked slumped and crooked. It wasn’t pretty. That nurse was right.

Prior to this I had somehow thought that bad posture was something that only affected inactive people or the elderly. Not me. I was still young and during my off time, I was physically active. I would hike and bike and even go to a fitness club once in awhile and lift a few weights. I asked myself if I was exercising, then why did I have bad posture? How could that be? What was causing my body to be crooked? And even though I was confident and effective at work, I could see that my posture was perhaps saying something else to the people around me. I was beginning to look old before my time and I didn’t like it.

Maybe you have had a similar experience. Maybe you noticed your posture in a mirror one day, or someone around you (family members are great for this!) commented on your posture. Maybe you saw a picture or video of yourself and didn’t like what you saw. We all have an image in our minds of how we look, and it can often be quite surprising to see how we really look. Or maybe, like me, when you saw yourself in a mirror, you realized you were beginning to look slumped over like your parents or grandparents long before you thought you should.

Posture is something that affects all of us and at all ages. We may tend to think of posture as something that just grows worse as we grow older, or perhaps that bad posture is something that just ‘happens’ to some people and not to others. But bad posture isn’t something confined to older people, nor does it just happen. Teenagers and young adults often have terrible posture. The forces that cause changes in our posture are universal and follow a logical cause and effect pattern, and thus also, as you will see, they can be corrected.

Or perhaps along with noticing your posture wasn’t as good as it could be, you also noticed that it was getting harder to do certain things, to move certain ways, for example, to turn to one side or the other. Again, this is the second aspect of posture mentioned above—alterations in our posture affect how we are able to comfortably move.

Maybe you’ve noticed it is harder for you to turn one way or the other, to get down on the floor to pick something up, to get up when you sit down, to reach above your head, or that one side of your body just doesn’t move as well or as smoothly as the other. Maybe you’ve noticed a hitch in the way you move when you participate in a sport or activity. Or you have reached a plateau in your favorite sport and can go no further (despite new clubs, rackets or lessons). You suspect it might have something to do with your body, but don’t know exactly what it is. Again, this could all be related to your posture or body’s alignment being off.

When our posture is off, it also usually means that certain muscles are tighter than they should be. This is what holds us in our often aberrant posture. This tightness of individual muscles can also make it hard to move as fluidly as we might like.

For some people, alterations in posture can manifest just as a global disinclination to be physically active. It is just no longer as fun or as easy to do physical things anymore. Something is not quite right. You often can’t put your finger on it, but it’s just no longer as effortless to be physically active, often despite being relatively young. Maybe you have been active in a specific sport for a number of years. Now you decide to quit. You may say I just don’t have time anymore or make up some other reason. But, again, although you may not make this connection consciously, the real reason may be that alterations in your posture or body alignment have made it less comfortable to play or to be physically active. But you could be throwing in the towel long before you need to.

Finally, because of posture problems, you may hurt. Again, the pain could be in your neck, back, shoulders, hips, knees or somewhere else. Posture problems can cause pain virtually everywhere. You may even make the connection yourself between problems with your posture and where you hurt. For example, you can see in the mirror that you are hunched over and your head is jutted forward, and you recognize that that is what’s causing the pain in the back of your neck. And you’d be right. Or you may not have made the connection. You may have been through a number of doctors and medical treatments and nothing has quite helped or made things right again. As you will see, I believe a fair portion of chronic muscle and joint problems can be traced back to posture or body alignment problems. And things often don’t get better because the underlying problem, posture, is never addressed.

Often muscle and joint pain related to posture problems start off small. When our posture just starts to get out of line, increased strain is intermittently placed on an area. It comes and goes, often only when we are forced to sit, stand or pursue the activity that exacerbates that aspect of our posture. Over time, if our posture problem persists or becomes more pronounced, the strain, which was initially episodic, now becomes relatively constant, and so does the pain. We begin to hurt almost all the time. For those who hurt, correcting your posture will help.

It Can Be Hard to Correct Our Posture

If we have bad posture, it can be hard to correct it. Not impossibly hard, but hard in the sense of we have to know what we’re doing. We have to understand what causes or creates our own individual posture, and based on that, once we understand what’s going on, we have to follow certain principles to correct our posture. The good news is that posture can be corrected. The bad news is that it often isn’t as easy or intuitive as we might hope.

For example, maybe because of noticing your posture was off, maybe because of noticing you were more hunched over or crooked than you used to be, you decided just to stand up straighter and not slouch.

That’s what I did. But it didn’t help. Or maybe you read a magazine article on posture and did the exercises. You know, ten exercises to correct your posture! I tried those too. Or perhaps you changed the way you sat or even changed your chair at work. But all this helped minimally or not at all.

Maybe you decided to exercise more regularly. Ahh, that’s it, you tell yourself. You’re just out of shape. You join a fitness club, lift weights or take out the old jogging shoes. For two weeks you wake up an hour earlier and run around a local track. Or you did what you used to do to get in shape.

But it doesn’t help correct your posture. And often, if your posture is off, exercising may not feel as good as it used to. Your knees, back or feet may hurt. You may not have that fluidity of motion that you used to have. Maybe it is just a matter of exercising more you tell yourself. I did that too! So you exercise more. But it really isn’t helping and it doesn’t seem to be correcting your posture.

At its worst, you are now just a man or woman with bad posture who is exercising. You can see all the time—people with crooked, hunched over bodies who are jogging or