Is Perfect Posture Possible? An Alliterative Rant

So in the course I was teaching this past weekend,we went through some quick and dirty postural assessments. At the end, everyone had discovered they were pretty messed up, especially after sitting in a classroom setting for the past 4 days. One person piped up and asked a very simple question:

How do we get our posture back to perfect??

Back to perfect would assume that at some point in time, we had perfect posture, so unfortunately this is pretty inaccurate. Let’s start at the beginning. When we go from a sperm and ovum into an actual fertilized bambino, we develop three germ layers that turn into our skin, digestion and nervous system. In this stage we resemble more of a question mark than a human being, maybe even a sea horse.

As children, we’re bow-legged, staggering, and jelly-like, which doesn’t bode well for spinal stability. As adolescences and teen-agers, we’re slouchy, emo and all-around bitchy towards everything and anything around us. Any wonder why high school teachers tend to hit the bottle?

As adults we begin to work an occupation that will typically require the same positions or movements repetitious for the remainder of our natural life, or until there’s an injury or a “disgruntled” worker climbing the bell tower and picking off passers-by with a sniper rifle while singing “Jingle Bells.” The weight of bills, spousal mood swings, and trying to drive to the local Costco without getting side-swiped from any of the jack bags on the road and then fight through the crowds can make anyone a little tense and hunch as a result.

At this point you go to the gym to find a trainer to help you feel better and they tell you that your posture sucks and that you’re going to wind up demolishing your shoulders and neck and spine if you don’t fix it right this second, and only they can help to do it.

Excuse me while I slam my face into the keyboard.

Let’s face facts. Posture is the sum of the forces applied to the body. If I was to look at someones posture at 8am after a relaxing evening’s sleep, it would be completely different at 5pm after riding a desk and driving through rush hour traffic, all while crushing a pot of coffee through the day. If I was to look at posture very carefully, it would change about 50 times in the span of 10 minutes as muscles adjust length and tension to reduce strain on any one area of the body and to subconsciously decrease any chance of feeling pain.

While we’re on the topic of posture, we should also look at the Myth of Neutral Spine. First off, whenever we take a step, our posture changes, our spine flexes, rotates, extends, and compresses. The spine will change position when we do a chin up versus a front squat versus a TRX rollout, so trying to get neutral spine will be a moving target if you’ve ever heard of one.

We seem to react in a catastrophizing way whenever we see some benign little issue with the mobility of a body part. Sure the big toe is important, but if it doesn’t have the required dorsieflexion you’re not going to wind up crippled and unable to scratch your nose. If this was the case, anyone with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis or an amputation would be in constant pain and states of injury from all their imbalances and compensations. Sure, posterior pelvic tilt may mean that there’s a greater chance of injury on the lower back, but I’ve seen a lot of people who slouch like it’s going out of style and have absolutely no back pain, so the theory that posture has a causative role in injuries and pain is completely unfounded.

So when the room full of future trainers asked why posture was important, the answer was as simple as analyzing posture: it gives you information on what may or may not be affected with a client, and how severe or un-severe it may be. Beyond that, it tells you very little. Once you see how the person moves, that will tell you more than simply staring at them awkwardly in a pose they may not ever hold. Namely, standing still while someone stares at every nuance of their being.

Now, I went to a clinician a few years ago who considered himself a “posture expert.” Let’s not dwell on that term, but instead look at what he did. He used a computerized photographic assessment of my posture, and determined that my left shoulder was elevated 1.215 inches compared to my right shoulder, my head was 2.11 inches ahead of the base of support, and my foot pressure was slightly uneven, with 54% of my weight on my left leg and 46% of my weight on my right. My right hip was externally rotated 6.21 degrees more than my right, and my spine had a slightly less than ideal curvature in the lumbar region, favoring flexion. Cool.

When I asked him what that all meant and what I should do about it, his suggestion was 3 times a week chiropractic treatments for the next four months to correct my imbalances and make me healthier.

No only did they not tell me about the list of injuries I’d received over my lifetime of being dumb and physically active, but he didn’t even think of the fact that I had absolutely no pain, and had just come off working for the summer in a construction job, which probably affected my posture slightly. Imagine what he would have said after a finals week in university!! To top this off, about 4 months later, he got in touch with me saying he was now out of chiropractic and he wanted to get me to send my clients to him so they could learn the new hybrid type of mixed martial arts he was a master of. So essentially he was telling me he went out of business as a chiropractor. Looks like no one else bought into it either.

The thought that posture could be made perfect without engaging the active musculotendinous system to improve its’ connective strength and resiliency no doubt leaves me wanting to rage like Donkey Kong on a bender. The spine is a highly mobile and constantly evolving structure that responds to every stress placed on it, and every position its’ placed in. One person’s ideal posture may make another person feel intense pain and be unable to move or exist.

So while I would love to extol on the virtues of how important posture really is, and trust me it is actually important, it’s one of those things that is much more difficult to determine than most people think. For one, it’s a constantly moving target, with a wide range of what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s going to be different for different sports, activities or occupations, and when we do those specific actions a lot, we build up an adaptation to perform them even more with less effort. Think speed skaters have one leg bigger than another as an accident, and that they’re going to be crippled as a result of the imbalance?

Now I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there with some specific thoughts about this, so chime in!!Leave a comment below and let me know if you think perfect posture is possible or if it’s a moving target. Let’s get a discussion going here, folks!!!