Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Myth 1: Perfect posture
03:12 Myth 2: Muscle imbalances
05:40 Myth 3: Your posture is hurting you
07:30 Myth 4: Postural exercise
09:27 Conclusion
Transcript:
We all want a nice, fully erect posture, but so few of us have it. In fact, it appears that none of us have it. One study interviewed a 100 people and asked them how satisfied were they with their posture and how close their sitting posture was to optimal. Zero of them said they thought their posture was optimal, but also zero of them actually had problems related to dysfunction or pain. So if they didn’t have any clinical issues, what exactly was wrong with their posture and what is a good posture in the first place?
Optimal posture has been scientifically defined as follows: “Optimal standing static posture is when the least amount of neuromuscular activity is required to maintain body position in space, and that which minimizes gravity stresses on the body. The biomechanical rationale for achieving and maintaining optimal posture is to move efficiently, free of impairments and dysfunction.” So scientists want your posture to be free of pain, free of dysfunction and effortless. Yet, when I say the word “optimal posture”, this problem evokes the idea of someone standing up fully straight in military posture. Yet this is not effortless at all. For most people this is a very effortful posture. So is this upright military posture actually optimal or even realistic to begin with? One particular aspect of our posture and that people are generally unhappy with is anterior pelvic tilt. This makes you stand a little bit more like Donald Duck with a little bit of a belly. Most people see this as an issue and there are tons of videos on YouTube telling you how to fix it.
In reality, it is perfectly normal. In fact, only 9% of men and 18% of women have neutral hip position. The rest predominantly had anterior pelvic tilt and a few individuals had posterior pelvic tilt. And none of the individuals with pelvic tilt had any symptoms. We all differ in our anatomy. For example, it’s normal to have asymmetry in the length of your limbs. It’s very normal to have up to 2 centimeters difference in the length of your arms or your legs. We also differ significantly in the shape of our pelvis and the shape of our spine, and in the shape of pretty much everything else in our body. So it is completely unrealistic to think that everyone should have this universal, perfect posture and everybody should look the same. There’s a wide variation of postures in the sense of not being associated with any pain, any dysfunction, and being biomechanically efficient. Everyone’s posture significantly varies over time. If I test your posture just after you came out of bed, it will be different than after you just came out of the shower, when you just came out of the gym and also it varies based on your mood.
We know that sad music, for example, can make people slump. And when people feel more confident and happy, they stand up more straight and they’re more proud and confident. So we know that mood changes your posture, everything else you did in the hour before changes your posture. There isn’t a universal posture, even for a certain individual. So it’s not only a fallacy to say that if your posture is not like that in a textbook – it is wrong, it is also a fallacy to say that you have one posture to begin with. This myth of a universal perfect posture is a classic moneymaking scam in the fitness industry. They convince you you have a problem that you didn’t know you had, and then they sell you the solution you didn’t know you needed.
The second major myth about our posture is that our posture is the result of our muscular balance. Specifically, the idea is that our muscles are in a certain position because there are muscles on multiple sides pulling on the joints and keeping it in a certain position, so the strength and length of the muscle groups around the joint determine the position of the joint. This would mean that, for example, we have anterior pelvic tilt because our glutes are not strong enough, our abs are not strong enough, and we have upper cross syndrome, which makes us slouch a little bit because our pecs are too tight or too strong, and our back is too weak or too slacked. If you are a strength trained individual do you really think that your back muscles are not strong enough to hold up your chest in daily life posture?
I’ve had some individuals that were pulling over 500 pounds in a deadlift, go to a physiotherapist and the physiotherapist told them: “Your back muscles are weak. That’s why you have a postural problem.” Right! So you can deadlift 500 pounds, but the muscles are not strong enough to just keep up the ribcage in position, right? It doesn’t make any sense. Your muscles are not even contracting to begin with. It’s not like everyone is like fully flexed all the time, right? Your pecs, your back muscles, everything is fully flexed and everything is pulling on, pulling on the joints. Your muscles are relaxed. That is literally the definition of optimal posture, that your muscles don’t have to expend a lot of energy to stay in that position. Multiple studies have assessed the relationship between posture and muscle strength, muscle length, muscle tightness, and there are basically no significant correlations between these things, outside of cases where people are just seriously detrained and they just need to exercise in general.
If you’re talking about someone who is already doing strength training then the strength of your muscle groups, the tightness of your muscle groups and the lengths of those muscles have no bearing on your posture. One group of researchers concluded the following: “There were some correlations between hip stiffness and postural measurements, but overall these were too few to permit generalized assumptions about posture and biomechanical properties. The textbook assumption of stiff muscles opposing compliant ones was not supported.” Basically, lower and upper cross syndrome, which really aren’t syndromes, are simply normal posture. It is not normal to stand up completely straight with military posture. That is effortful which makes it suboptimal posture. Normal posture is that people are a little bit slumped, you don’t have a completely flat stomach, and you don’t have a perfectly neutral pelvic position. That is not an abnormality, that is literally the norm.
The 3rd major myth about our posture is that deviations from the optimal military posture cause pain. This belief is especially prevalent regarding back pain, but the idea is that if you have anterior pelvic tilt or upper cross syndrome, or you slouch a little bit, or you don’t sit up straight, then that causes back pain. In reality, multiple large systematic reviews have concluded that there is essentially no relationship between someone’s posture and the likelihood of experiencing back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, or pretty much pain anywhere. This includes your posture when you walk, when you sit, the way you stand, your posture in pretty much any type of daily behavior is completely unrelated to the likelihood of you experiencing any type of pain. Again, outside of some severe clinical cases. And to the extent that there is any stress over time in the first place, your body adapts to that relatively easily, just like it adapts to any type of stress like that of exercise.
Now, I would note that being sedentary is bad for your health, that is very clear. But the posture in which you are sedentary doesn’t actually matter that much. You can get issues from sitting for a long period of time in a slump posture, but you can also get issues from sitting very upright, very military posture for a long period of time as well. You can also get issues from standing too long. So it’s maintenance of a posture over very long periods of time being static, not moving, that is the issue, rather than any type of posture inherently being the cause of all evil. In fact, some of these posture abnormalities that aren’t really abnormalities to begin with seem to be associated with greater athletic performance. We see anterior tilt, for example, prevalently in runners and people that run more and have more training experience that exercise more, tend to get greater anterior pelvic tilt. And this seems to be a functional adaptation that makes them faster. Similarly, some research suggests that a forward rounded posture and some kyphosis, which is rounding off the upper back, is actually advantageous for boxers and swimmers.
Myth number 4: There are certain special exercises you can do to correct your posture. Wrong! In fact, most research has failed to find any effect of exercise in general, regardless of the type, on our posture. For example, a study by Wang at all looked at the common prescription of stretching the backs and training the upper back to move the shoulder blades back, and they found no effect at all on shoulder blade position. Another study by Levine et al. found no effect of an abdominal strength training program on anterior pelvic tilt. Because for most individuals these are not problems to be corrected in the first place. Now there are some effects of exercise in general on posture in people who have significant muscular weaknesses, elderly individuals, for example, that haven’t been training for a long period of time. Exercise can certainly be beneficial, and even when we see that exercise is beneficial, the type of exercise doesn’t seem to matter.
So it seems to be more a case of making sure you’re not completely detrained, that you don’t have significant weaknesses, rather than that there is some type of magic postural correction exercise for you. And this is generally true both for actual postural changes, like the changes in your shoulder blade position or your pelvic position, which again, typically don’t occur in the first place, and for the resolution of pain. In fact, a good case can be made that exercise itself doesn’t physiologically or biomechanically do much for your posture, but it is mostly the confidence and the well-being that comes from exercise that improves posture. The relationships between our mood and our level of happiness and our posture are actually stronger than the relationship between posture and biomechanical factors like muscle length or strength. So when people start exercising and you become happier and you become more confident with their body, that can certainly improve their posture. Exercise is very effective to reduce depression, stronger than some drugs, in fact. So when we see that people become more confident with their body and therefore they start standing up more straight, that could be a factor for sure. But it doesn’t have a lot to do with biomechanics.
In conclusion, most people watching this video don’t need to do anything special about their posture because there is nothing to fix. If you don’t have pain or dysfunction, you probably don’t have a postural problem. Many people think there is something wrong with their posture for absolutely no reason. There is a massive industry trying to feed on this insecurity, but don’t let them do that because that insecurity is probably causing you to slouch and slump much more than any biomechanical factor like tight pecs, or any other imaginary problem that they will tell you you have. If you like this type of evidence based content I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.
