Your Definitive Guide to Understanding and Improving Your Posture (Part 7)

Ok but how should I actually fix my posture?

Ok Noah, there’s no such thing as good or bad posture. Fine. But, if after reading all of my previous articles (you did read my previous articles right?) you still want to improve your posture, read on for the secret sauce.

Improving our posture in a sustainable way relies on changing how the body holds itself up from the bottom up, which relies on improving the relationship between our rib cage and pelvis, ensuring that they are ‘stacked’ nicely on top of one another. How do we go about this? Well that depends on the posture you present with?

Anterior Pelvic Tilt 

An anterior pelvic tilt is noticed when the front of your pelvis is lower than the back. This will lead to a large arch in your lower back and your upper back will then sit backwards to counterbalance. You will almost certainly see shoulder blades that are stuck rounded forward, which is classically considered that ‘dangerous’ slumped forward posture. So many fitness professionals try to fix rounded shoulders from the top down by cueing their clients to squeeze your shoulder blades together and do rowing movements to ‘correct their imbalances’. But this solution does not work because it fundamentally misunderstands how our muscles work.

Go back to the distinction I made between ‘active’ and ‘relaxed’ postures. If we are deadlifting, for example and our shoulder blades keep getting pulled forward, strengthening our lats and upper back will help prevent this. In this context, the muscles of our upper back are working incredibly hard to keep the weight from pulling everything forward. But our muscles are not active all the time, they only work as hard as they need. As soon as you set the bar down, and release the tension in your upper back, they will settle back into their previous position.

In fact, in this case it is not the shoulder blades that is the issue. Your shoulder blades appear to be sitting forward because the front of your ribcage is compressed, meaning you are unable to get air there. When the front side of the ribcage is compressed, it makes it appear as if your shoulder blades are pulled forward. But why is the front of your ribcage compressed? It all goes back to your anterior pelvic tilt.

So how do we fix the dreaded anterior pelvic tilt, and the knock on effects from it? We do this by strengthening the muscles that pull our pelvis backwards, into a posterior pelvic tilt. The main ones we want to target here are the hip flexors, abs, and hamstrings. The hip flexors and abs are important for setting our abdomen backwards in space and our hamstrings are essential for tilting the pelvis back underneath us. Importantly, we need to strengthen our hamstrings in this specific function. Our hamstrings serve a bunch of different roles in the body, but the supine breathing series in the Woven Posture Program trains your hamstrings in the specific way we need them to be stronger.  

Swayback 

If you present with a swayback posture, you are holding yourself up in space by squeezing your glutes. This leads to your hips sitting pushed forward and the entire upper body sitting back. If you drew a straight line from the middle of your foot to the top of your head you would see the hips in front of that line and the upper body behind it. In an anterior pelvic tilt you would see something similar with the upper body, but only the abdomen would be forward, the hips would still be back. In a lot of cases you can see rounded shoulders similar to the anterior pelvic tilt.

For people presenting with a swayback posture, just like in the anterior pelvic tilt, the key is getting them to use a different strategy at the hips to hold themselves upright. This means again facilitating the hamstrings and abs to hold our abdomen in place and, more importantly for swayback, to get our glutes to relax. If you have a swaback posture your glutes and hips are almost certainly incredibly tight. Restoring this hip mobility is crucial, which is where the kickstand hinge is money.