I’ve come a long way in undoing the embarrassing teenage habits. As a general rule, there’s more to be learned from people who previously struggled with the trait you’re looking to develop, as opposed to those who naturally display the skill.

Improvement takes time, but identify your sticking points and you’ll streamline and fast-track the process to developing long-term habits to remove pain and accelerate your life.

POSTURE: THE ‘WHAT’

From a side view, the spine follows an S curve. The ‘S’ comprises of the natural curvatures of the spine’s subsections: cervical lordosis (extended/anteriorly convex shape), thoracic kyphosis (flexed/concave), lumbar lordosis and sacral kyphosis:

 Abnormal length-tension relationships between muscles in the body will affect the resting position of that joint, and ultimately your resting spinal position.

While they say curves are beautiful, there is no perfect posture. Improving yours isn’t necessarily about straightening the spine: these curves are crucial to its stability and function.

Returning to ‘neutral’ for you could be about regaining some of of the natural curves, while in someone else it could be about reducing an excessive curve, like slouching or ape-bum.

These muscles are generally designed to provide stability rather than powerful contraction, but they are capable of generating stiffness when challenged. : aberrant or delayed activation, or hyper sensitisation to pain, where stimuli to spinal positional receptors are interpreted by the CNS as pain, even in the absence of tissue damage.

Ever heard of Guy Wires?, They’re designed to reinforce a pole or mast’s stability. The spine is much the same. Antagonistic muscles pull on opposing sides of the spine to stabilise it – hence anything that loosens one guy wire and tightens the other, such as being asymmetrically weak, having big boobs, or walking around in anterior pelvic tilt will destabilise the spine.

Your head is heavier than you think and holding it suspended in front of you, can cause significant strain on your cervical spine (neck) extensors, leading to muscle tightness & potentially headaches. Likewise sitting with your chin poked out in front of you can cause your neck flexors to become weak and less effective, making it easier for your body to adopt this unhelpful position. Both these positions can cause excess stress on certain joints in your cervical spine, causing a reduction in mobility and potentially pain.

This can lead to an increased kyphosis (rounding of your upper back) to compensate which can cause the muscle in your back to become elongated and weak. These muscles are referred to as postural muscles, whose job it is to keep you upright, however, they become ineffective & promote a slouched posture. These muscles can also start to fatigue quickly, which means trying to sit upright for longer takes a lot more effort and thought! The muscles in your chest and in front of your shoulders may also become shortened and tight.

CONTROL OF POSTURE

Posture is subject to vestibular, emotional, visual, cortical/somatic, and mechanical control. Like breathing, it is one of these funny body processes that can be either autonomic or voluntary; influenced by your balance, level of stress, mood, neurochemical state, muscular tightness, ‘trigger points’, threat perception and even your self-belief.

So maybe posture IS more complex than we first thought, and perhaps that is why some of you may resemble the image below a little more…

If you can restore the length-tension relationships between your chest and back, you’ll have a tall & relaxed resting posture that displays your physique most symmetrically. Plus, there’ll be no need to force it: better to have an effortless natural posture than to constantly fight against your tight pecs to puff your chest out. Ironically you’ll actually look wider than your typical bodybuilder, walking around like a brick shit house. 

POSTURE: THE ‘WHy’

PAIN

The association between joint posture and pain/overuse injuries is more clear cut for feet, hips and shoulders.

Back pain, on the other hand, is a huge and messy topic and doesn’t follow the same rules. I’ll be covering it in more depth later this year.

The emerging picture is that posture is instead the effect. The body is adaptive. So much so, that pain-free, high-level performance is possible even in spite of clinically abnormal postures:

Saying that, we’re not invincible, and we would be prudent not to take the piss with our spines. Assuming our spines can only handle a certain amount of wear and tear in our lives, we would be best served saving it for lifting.

Unloaded postures: Sitting, standing

• When sitting, change in posture is more important than sitting in a specific way. Vary your position from time

• “The ideal sitting posture is a variable one.” – McGill

• Prolonged sitting/standing with the spine in end-range flexion or extension probably isn’t the best idea

• “Sitting is the new smoking” is mostly scaremongering from a posture/pain perspective.

Loaded postures: Lifting

• Similarly, we do not want to load the spine at end range flexion or extension. Stick to lumbar neutral for any heavy loading.

• Maintain intra-abdominal pressure in all directions when lifting. To get a feel for this, try wearing a belt, ‘breathing into your obliques’ and pushing out against it in 360 degrees. Many make the mistake of just pushing their belly out to the front. Never vacuum your abs under load! Your colon doesn’t do such a good job of stabilising your spine.

• Mechanically, you can deadlift more weight with a rounded back, and there’s even some argument to doing so, but this requires an immense level of technical proficiency and spinal proprioception.

• On balance, this is not recommended, and best reserved as a choice for the competitive lifter to weigh up. All of your deadlifting should be done in a textbook neutral posture.

• More importantly, the spine must not move under load. The highest risk of disc herniation is where the spinal position buckles during a max deadlift, for example.

• Finally, since posture is tied in with flexibility: say you lack ROM in your shoulders in a squat – this will manifest by compensation the next joint down, and the next, all the way down the kinetic chain and alter your lifting mechanics. And usually not in a good way. Your posture is then directly limiting your ability to lift with correct technique, possibly putting you at risk of injury.

POSTURE: THE ‘how’

But how do you find lumbar neutral?

Here are five top tips for better posture, taken from part of our F4F Family Check-ins –

1. Bring your belt buckle to your belly button. This is a Zac Cupples reference. < make sure to check him out

2. Draw your front ribs down and in – or knit your front ribs together: these cues encourage the engagement of the deep abdominal musculature as well as removing any excess lordosis or extension of the lumbar spine, helping stabilize the spine and maintain a natural curvature.

3. Stack your ears over your shoulders.

4. Root down with the four corners of your feet.
   It’s great to root down in standing poses with all four corners of your feet—the bases of the big and little toes, and the inner and outer heels! Hurrah! We should all do this as much as possible.

5. Finally, Move your shoulders up, back, and press your shoulder blades against your back.
   Yes! Since most of our shoulders are too far forward and down, this is a valuable cue that works across a wide range of poses to move the shoulders to a place that allows for the most interior spaciousness, and where they are most evenly supported by their stabilizing musculature.

Breathing (get to know your nose) 

As expected, slumped sitting restricts your ability to breathe deeply. I’ve presented a module on breathing in our Facebook Community Page; another one of those ‘surely can’t be too complicated’ topics. For brevity, remember we have parasympathetic stretch receptors in the base of the lungs, so deep belly breathing directly increases vagal tone, reducing heart rate and stress. Shallow, chest breathing does the opposite and puts you in a low-level state of stress.

Adopting a default posture that lends itself to deep breathing, therefore, reduces that friction of having to constantly remind yourself.

Best way to do this? – Nasal Breathing while in a neutral position. Try this here!

Nasal Breathing in a neutral position

There’s a reason why ultramarathon legend Scott Jurek encourages breathing through your nostrils: it enhances endurance. One study shows nose breathing reduces breathing rates by over 50% and decreases perceived exertion by 60%—which means you might be able to work out harder and longer if you simply close your mouth when you walk or run. (Give it a try: Next time you hit the sidewalk or treadmill, spend thirty minutes alternating between the nose and mouth breathing and notice how you feel!)

IMPROVING YOUR POSTURE #101

“Can you even change posture?” – FIT4FUNCTION 1:1 Family Member

First, we need to eliminate any obvious causes, such as excessive pressing: pulling ratio of volume in your training program, silly shoes, bad habits, poorly adjusted desk/chair etc. Once the low hanging fruit is out of the way, we can look at correction.

Generally, poor results are observed from stretching and strengthening alone, without your conscious input to repattern the posture. Mechanisms are not clear cut, but here’s what I believe is happening:

• Stretching: New range of motion is created. If it is then frequently accessed, we remap the somatosensory cortex (our sense of what body positions are safely accessible) to integrate that as our new sense of our body’s limits.

• Strengthening exercises, even non-specific ones, give the athlete confidence in the new positions, even if strengthening is not accompanied by an improvement in dysfunctional movement (improvements in pain can occur without improvement in dysfunctional mechanics: (Click Here for my top three exercises. 1 - 2 - 3 )

• With the newfound confidence and expanded sense of what is a ‘safe’ ROM or position, the body can settle into that new position if we are willing to consciously develop it.

The relationship doesn’t seem to hold as well for the transfer to functional/dynamic postures and require sport-specific training. So, (warning: prepare for your mind to be blown) to improve your technique, you need to practice your technique.

With that said, we sometimes structurally need fixing too – if your pecs are chronically tight/short, you’re only going to be able to hold your shoulders back for about 30 seconds before your upper back is exhausted, no matter how strong your upper back is.

With that said, we sometimes structurally need fixing too – if your pecs are chronically tight/short, you’re only going to be able to hold your shoulders back for about 30 seconds before your upper back is exhausted, no matter how strong your upper back is.

Give these C.A.R.S exercises a try to start to relieve pec tension. 1 - 2 - 3

Are you really going to build your endurance from 30 seconds up to 24 hours?

“Correlational studies have failed to detect a significant association between muscle strength and scapular position but found a significant relationship between muscle length and scapular position. Prospective intervention studies have shown that stretching the anterior chest muscles on its own or in combination with strengthening the scapular retractors can alter the position of the scapula at rest in individuals with abducted scapulae.“

“A review of the literature has found a lack of reliable, valid data collected in controlled settings to support the contention that exercise will correct existing postural deviations. Likewise, objective data to indicate that exercise will lead to postural deviations are lacking.“

A Fit4function Athlete asked the following:

Lately, I’ve noticed of neck pain / pre-headache feeling when front squatting and split squatting as my upper thoracic and back fatigue, shoulders roll forward and thoracic spine curves forward, putting a lot of pressure on my thoracic spine and neck. – FIT4FUNCTION 1:1 Family Member

Case in point ^. Remember what I said above about lacking ROM causing a cascade of compensation down the kinetic chain in a movement?

Whether or not you use those proprietary fancy screening tools, the general principle is this:

1) Pick the elements of your posture which you aim to fix

2) Determine the muscles that are tight, and their antagonists

3) Identify:

• a) the new, desired pattern,

• b) a cue

• c) an action reminder to trigger you to restore the pattern when you slip into old habits..

4) Get to work stretching the short muscles, strengthening the antagonists and consciously accessing and inhabiting that new range. This is your new home.

Some ideas to play with below, but this doesn’t need to be complicated. With a correct assessment and knowing a muscle’s origin, insertion and action, you can devise your own routine, and tweak it by tuning in to what is tight on the day.

Tight muscles:

• Static stretching: Explore and feel your limits, breathing into the space created, and consciously relax into and inhabit that space. Rather than angrily holding a stretch for time, it’s much more effective to sit in the stretch for 21 breaths.

• Mobilising the joint

• Soft tissue work

• Dynamic stretching

Antagonists

• Activation

• Strengthening

New pattern

• Conscious control: Action reminder

• Visualisation

• Proprioceptive feedback, e.g. tape, paying someone to hit you with a stick etc.

Client Case Study – Paul Hart – Hunchback W/ postural-related vertigo

Assessment:

1) Take photographs from the front and side

2) Say you identify the most common postural defect in lifters: kyphosis & medial humeral rotation, i.e. hunched back and rounded shoulders. Often this is accompanied by lordosis: the spine is trying to maintain an S shape so you aren’t falling forwards.

3) Assess the major functional patterns in the sequence, such as wall slide, shoulder internal/external rotation, flexion, extension etc. Stretching is both diagnostic and therapeutic.

4) Based on our assessment, we identify pec minor, biceps and lats to be tightest.

5) Since the lordosis may be contributing (or sometimes even the cause), consider the hips too: tight iliopsoas and lower back, weak/lazy glutes & abs.

A) Stretch the Tight Muscles

1) Select a static stretch for each muscle group.

This article is already pretty long. I’m exhausted, you’re exhausted. Let’s call it a day: you now know the what, why and how of posture, and now have an effective framework to start fixing yourself. Using the core principles above, explore the stretches, mobilisations and cues for yourself. Develop some action reminders and a stretching schedule and get to work to unlock a taller, happier and niggle-free you.

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