Your Definitive Guide to Understanding and Improving Your Posture (Part 4)
What is perfect posture?
In so-called ‘perfect’ posture, the body is aligned in such a way so that all of our muscles are sitting in the mid-point of their length tension relationships. What does this mean? Take your bicep for example. If you were to straighten your arm completely this would lengthen or stretch out the muscles in your bicep. Bend your elbow fully and it fully shortens or contracts those muscles. Bend it about halfway and you’ve got the middle point. Muscles can develop tension if they are stuck in lengthened or contracted positions for too long; they would ideally sit in that mid-point.
What does perfect posture look like? Imagine drawing two imaginary lines, one from the top of the pelvis and another from the bottom of the first ribs. When these two lines are parallel to one another our ribs are stacked on top of our hips and we are in ‘perfect’ posture.
Take the pelvis as an example. We have a ton of muscles that act on the pelvis, pulling it in different directions. We have muscles like the internal and external obliques, i.e those ‘deep’ core muscles, and hip flexors that sit on the front side of our body and pull our pelvis back. Additionally, we have hamstrings on the backside of our body that do the same thing. But we also have spinal erectors, the muscles that run on our lower back, that pull it forwards from the back of our body. If the pelvis is rotated forwards, otherwise known as tipped anteriorly, it will lengthen our hamstrings and abdominals, and shorten our spinal erectors and hip flexors. If you’ve ever wondered why your hip flexors always feel so tight, it could be in large part because your pelvis is stuck in this tipped forward position. If the pelvis is level, all these muscles are back where they ‘belong,’ resting in their mid-range.
But if we are standing with a pelvis that is rotated forwards, it means we have spinal erectors that are ‘overactive’ relative to our hamstrings, hip flexors, and abs. While ‘overactive’ sounds very scary, it simply means that our lower back is doing more of the work for holding us upright, which is not a bad thing at all. Stand for 5 minutes and you won’t think twice about it. Stand for 8 hours straight and you might start to feel some fatigue in your back. But if you slowly worked up to standing for 8 hours straight over a long period of time your body would adapt and get stronger.
This is why there is no such thing as good or bad posture. Our bodies are very capable of adapting to the postures we spend the most time in. Spend long periods of time holding yourself up exclusively with your low back and your low back muscles will grow in size and strength, and the discs in your spine will get thicker. Use a strategy that involves your abs, hip flexors and hamstrings and you will more evenly distribute that stress throughout your lower half. You will never suffer the ill effects of ‘bad’ posture because you have almost certainly had that posture your entire life and have spent years adapting.
Where your posture becomes more important is when we have the ability to put a lot more stress on our bodies quickly. Let’s say we just started a new job that requires us to stay hunched over for hours, that will probably exceed the demands of our body’s capability until it adapts. Or let’s say we start lifting weights. If we consistently squat and deadlift with our lower back arched aggressively it will load your lower back more than the rest of our lower body. Provided that our body has enough time to rest and recover it is no problem. But, oftentimes, we can overdo it without realizing.
It is important to note how this can work in the opposite direction as well. If you were to work incredibly hard to change your posture by forcing yourself to hold ‘good posture’ all the time you will actually lose resiliency in all other positions, which will make you more injury prone, not less. Real life demands being slumped over all the time. Next time you move try to pick up a heavy box with ‘perfect posture.’ It’s actually impossible. Why do so many people hurt their backs bending forward to tie their shoes first thing in the morning? Is it because they did not have perfect posture when they did so? I don’t think so.
To summarize, there is no such thing as good or bad posture, but our posture will influence which parts of our body we load the most. ‘Perfect’ posture exists as an ideal where the load of the activity is spread evenly throughout our body. But your posture is not linked to pain because your body has most likely already adapted to that specific posture. But when we add weightlifting into the mix your posture becomes much more important, as all of a sudden we are introducing your body to a lot more work that it may be unprepared for.
