When you think about good posture, what is it that you picture?
Good posture can have profound effects, both physically and socially. From a physiotherapy standpoint, there are many reasons I can tell you as to why good posture decreases the stress in certain areas of your body and has the potential to improve pain.
Physical benefits
Depending on your posture, you may be placing excessive load on certain joints and tissues of your body.
In sitting posture, we frequently see rounded shoulders, a slouched back, and a forward head. Many studies have shown a correlation between poor work posture and back & neck pain. In terms of specifics, when your head is held directly on top of your shoulders, the weight on your spine is 10lbs. However, for every inch you shift your head forwards, the weight on your spine nearly doubles. Not to mention the excessive strain placed on certain muscles in your neck.
In standing, there are various postures we commonly see. With prolonged office work and lots of sitting, we often see a forward tilting of the pelvis which places excessive load on the joints of the lower back.
There is no doubt that poor posture can influence the load placed on your joints and strain placed on certain muscles.
Personal development benefits
- Individuals with open body postures have been shown to exhibit more power-related behaviors, such as using more power-related words, taking a risky bet, and taking more action in group situations. (1)
- Those with good sitting posture have been shown to rate more highly their own qualifications and skills vs those with poor sitting postures. (2)
- Adopting a powerful posture has been suggested to improve an individual’s sense of perceived control over their circumstances, and therefore potentially decrease their sensitivity to pain. Simply improving your posture may be a useful tool for pain management. (3)
- Individuals with a more upright posture have been shown to exhibit higher self-esteem, better mood, and lower fear levels compared to slouched individuals. This falls in line with the “Embodied Cognition” theory, that is, that muscular and autonomic states can influence emotion and behavior. (4).
When we look at posture from a more holistic standpoint, what we come across is a potential tool for self-development that can’t be ignored. To improve your sense of control over your circumstances and belief in your own qualifications is to take a step towards optimizing yourself as an individual. To improve your mood and decrease your fear levels is to put your best self forward, whether you’re at home with family or in the middle of an important meeting at work. We tend to think of the mind and the body as separate. Even when we discuss “the mind-body connection”, that still implies that they are separate entities coming together to influence each other. But what we should be doing is viewing them as one; as the self. And the goal of physiotherapy, in my view, is to optimize the self. Improving your posture is an avenue to do that.
Make sure to follow my next few posts as I’ll dive into more detail regarding the common postures we see, the concept of stretching, and its potential impact on posture, and how to maintain postural improvements long term.