Yes, you should stand up straight — for all sorts of reasons
Slouching is bad for both your physical and emotional health. It’s never too late to start paying attention.
I had a second-grade teacher who used a ruler to poke slouching students between the shoulder blades to get them to stand up straight. While you might find fault with her tactics — and indeed as little kids we wished all manner of cartoonish calamities would befall her — she wasn’t wrong in her concern about our carriage.
Beyond basic aesthetics, good posture — an erect, balanced bearing — determines the ease and efficiency with which you move your body. Less well-known is that good posture is also essential for optimal circulation, respiration, digestion and bladder function. Increasing evidence suggests it also improves cognitive ability and enhances your mood.
Moreover, when you hold yourself upright such that no bony or soft tissue is catching, compressing or straining, it sets you up to maintain your physical fitness, freedom of movement and independence as you age. Physical therapists and geriatricians agree that a stooping posture doesn’t have to be the inevitable consequence of getting old.
“There are a lot of people who are in their 90s and 100s who have beautiful posture,” says Dr Deborah Kado, a geriatrics researcher and professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The difference is these elders pay attention to their posture, which most people don’t. If you don’t believe me, grab a window seat at your favourite coffee shop and watch the parade of posturally challenged pedestrians — heads down, shoulders rounded, butts curved under.
While you can’t age out of improving your posture, it’s better to start sooner rather than later. Just know that contrary to popular belief, it isn’t simply a matter of strengthening your core. Ballet dancers, who train assiduously to maintain an erect and elegant bearing, will be the first to tell you that.
“It takes a lot more than a strong core to hold your body in alignment,” says Shelly Power, executive director of the Philadelphia Ballet and a former dancer. Strengthening your core while other parts of your body remain weak or tight is like reinforcing the central frame of a kite that has flimsy, overstretched fabric and knotted up string. It isn’t going to fly, or at least not for long.
Ways to improve your posture
Look at yourself
The first step to improving your posture is recognising how you are holding yourself in space. “The more aware we are of our posture, the more we can work to correct it,” says Jennifer Danzo, a physical therapist and certified athletic trainer at the Cleveland Clinic.
Most people have no idea how bad their posture is. Power says ballet dancers are constantly reminded of their posture because they spend their days surrounded by mirrors. Eventually their erect posture becomes so ingrained that they carry themselves the same way outside of the studio, even years after they retire.
Proponents of the Alexander Technique, which teaches body awareness to improve posture and physical function, advise temporarily positioning multiple mirrors (the inexpensive kind, typically hung on the back of closet doors) at various angles around your home and workspace. Not only will you become more aware of your posture, but you’ll also be able to identify aspects of your environment that might not be helping you ergonomically — say, a squishy sofa that folds you up like a taco, or too low kitchen countertops that force you to hunch over during food prep.
Danzo recommends recruiting friends, family, co-workers and exercise buddies to surreptitiously take photographs and videos of you from various vantages throughout the day. While sometimes humbling, if not a little horrifying, such 360-degree views can be incredibly instructive.
Our postural irregularities occur in three dimensions, so that while you may think you look perfectly aligned when viewing yourself head-on in a mirror, you may be woefully misaligned when glimpsed from the side or from behind. For example, when viewed from the side, you might notice your pelvis tilting backward. Or you might notice one scapula, or shoulder blade, is higher than the other when viewed from behind.
Befriend a wall
Laurie Johnson, a physical therapist in Houston, says another great way to self-assess and self-correct is to stand with head, shoulders and buttocks held against a wall. Your heels should also be touching or no more than a few inches away. “The wall is your friend,” says Johnson. “The wall shows you what it feels like to be aligned.”
It may not be comfortable. In fact, you might not even be able to do it. But by repeatedly putting yourself in that position, to the best of your ability, two or three times a day, you will begin to retrain and re-educate your body. Tip: It helps if you imagine a string pulling you upward from the top of your head during your wall sessions.
Also keep in mind that your head is about as heavy as a bowling ball. Even when your head is in a straight-up, neutral position it exerts 10 to 12 pounds of pressure on your cervical spine. But at a 15-degree forward tilt, the force increases to 27 pounds. At 45 degrees, the angle at which most people bend to look at their cellphones, the force is 49 pounds.
“It’s why dancers are trained not to look at the floor,” says the Philadelphia Ballet’s Power. “If you look at the floor, your head bends down and you’re out of your balance.” It’s also why you want to actually rest the back of your head on headrests — in cars, aeroplanes, movie theatres, etc. — so you can remain level-headed, as it were, while seated.
Stretching exercises
Again, holding your body in proper alignment may feel unnatural and uncomfortable at first. You might only be able to it for short periods. But your discomfort is your guide, indicating which muscles, joints, and/or nerves may require attention in terms of strengthening and stretching exercises.
Some research suggests that dynamic stretching, where you elongate and tone your body while in motion (think Tai Chi), may be more effective for alleviating postural hindrances than static stretching, where you stretch and hold certain positions (think yoga).
Le Rowell, who will turn 90 in June, credits dynamic-stretching workouts called Essentrics for keeping her erect and agile. She started 25 years ago after she and her late husband returned to the US after decades in the Foreign Service. Essentrics, then called Classical Stretch, had just made its debut on public television.
“I had been a competitive tennis player and realised I needed to find something else to keep my back and my body going,” says Rowell, who easily walks up and down the three flights of stairs of her home in Bethesda, Maryland. “Classical Stretch gave me focused continual-movement workouts that I work into my daily routine.”
Body and mind
Rowell’s confident, buoyant personality may also contribute to her erect bearing and extraordinary agility. How you carry yourself reveals a lot about your psychology, and vice versa. Johnson, the Houston physical therapist, says she can improve people’s posture just by telling them to walk like they are about to go tell off their boss. Or, if you happen to like your boss, maybe walk as if you were a Marvel superhero. “People’s bodies just instinctively know what to do,” Johnson says.
A 2023 analysis of posture research going back more than 20 years revealed that there is a significant bi-directional relationship between depression and a slumped posture. Another study showed that participants who maintained an upright posture while in a stressful situation reported higher self-esteem, better mood and less anxiety, compared with participants who slumped. Furthermore, better posture is thought to foster a sense of vitality and pleasure, improve cognitive performance, increase rate of speech and reduce self-absorption.
Benjamin Pelz, a psychotherapist at CuraMed Akutklinik Allgäu in Germany, published a review article last year in the Journal of Psychology and Neuroscience looking at the positive neuropsychological effects of posture on competitive athletes. A former collegiate soccer player, Pelz says he became interested in the topic when he noticed that teammates who had pregame nerves to the point of nausea overcame their fear by assuming an upright, confident posture before walking out on the pitch.
“It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re from, or which language you speak, everybody understands body language,” says Pelz. “An upright posture is a sign of competency” that research shows can be self-fulfilling.
Getting help
This isn’t to say attitude is everything when it comes to posture. Structural abnormalities and degenerative issues can subvert your stature, literally and figuratively, as well as your mood. Which is why going to a physical therapist to evaluate your posture is a good idea — preferably before any misalignment or deterioration starts to cause pain or injuries.
The Cleveland Clinic’s Danzo says it’s never too late: “There’s always opportunity for improvement.” Physical therapists will do a range of observational and flexibility tests to develop a regime tailored to help you achieve the best possible posture for your physique. “Our job as physical therapists is to help you develop enough flexibility and strength so you can form new postural habits,” says Johnson.
And if you fear sliding back into your old postural habits, you can always download one of the myriad mobile and desktop apps like Posture Reminder, Upright, and PosturePal, which remind you to check your posture at regular intervals or use motion-sensing technology to alert you when you start to slouch — AI’s answer to my second-grade teacher and her ruler.
Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston and author of “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters.”
The Wall Street Journal
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