How to Improve Posture by Training the Range Your Body Has Lost

Everyone has been told to sit up straight. Parents say it, teachers say it, and most adults say it to themselves around three in the afternoon, when they catch their reflection in a dark monitor and don’t love what they see. So they pull the shoulders back, lift the chest, tuck the chin, and hold it. Ten minutes later they’re slumped again, and the conclusion they reach is that they lack discipline.

I’d frame that differently. Holding a position you can only reach through effort is a range and strength problem, and willpower runs out long before either one improves. Posture gets better when your body has more positions available to it and the control to use them, which makes the work look a lot more like training than like remembering to stand tall.

What does good posture look like?

Good posture is the ability to move into and out of positions with control, and to stay in any of them as long as the task needs without one area doing all the work. That sounds loose next to the classic plumb line from ear to ankle, but it matches how bodies behave. Nobody holds one position all day. You reach, bend, carry, sit in a car, sink into a couch, look down at a phone. A spine that can flex, extend, side bend, and rotate through its full range, segment by segment, handles all of that without much complaint.

A spine that has lost most of that range spends the day falling back on the one position it has left. That default is what people usually call bad posture. The rounded upper back, the head drifting forward, the shoulders rolling in; these are the positions a body settles into once the opposite positions have gotten hard to reach.

Forcing yourself into the opposite position works for a few minutes because you can borrow range you don’t control. The muscles doing the borrowing tire out, and the body slides back to where its range lives. So the more useful question is how many positions you can get into, and how well you can hold them once you’re there.

Does bad posture cause back and neck pain?

This is where posture content tends to overreach, and the research is messier than most of it admits. An umbrella review of 41 systematic reviews found associations between low back pain and things like spine posture, prolonged sitting, standing, and bending, but no consensus that any of them cause it (1). A meta-analysis on forward head posture found that adults with neck pain did carry their heads further forward than adults without it, with the clearest difference in middle-aged and older adults, and no meaningful link in adolescents (2). And a study that followed several hundred people from age 17 to 22 found that a slumped sitting neck posture at 17 didn’t raise the odds of persistent neck pain later; in young women, the group that sat most upright had higher odds than the slumped group, and in men there was no association at all (3).

Put together, posture and pain show up alongside each other often enough to take seriously, and one slouched position makes a weak explanation for why something hurts. Physical therapists have been making a version of this case for years, pointing out how little evidence sits behind “sit up straight” as advice for pain (4).

Here’s the thing, though. From what I’ve seen in the gym, people whose upper backs are stuck in one position are rarely stuck in just that one place. The thoracic spine won’t extend, the shoulder blades barely move, the neck has lost rotation to one side. That loss of range is something we can measure and train, and it matters for how someone moves even when it has nothing to do with their pain. Restoring range a joint is supposed to have is a reasonable bet on its own merits, and it doesn’t depend on posture being the cause of anything.

Where posture usually gets stuck

When someone comes in asking about posture, two areas account for most of what they see in the mirror.

The first is the thoracic spine, the twelve vertebrae behind your ribs. It’s built to round forward, and it’s also supposed to extend back out of that curve. After enough years of desks, steering wheels, and screens, extension gets harder to reach and the joints around it start compensating. The neck juts forward to bring the eyes level, the low back over-arches to get you upright, and the shoulders roll in. We went through how that happens, and how to tell if it’s you, in why your posture problem is probably a t-spine problem.

The second is the shoulder blades. The scapula floats on the back of the rib cage and is supposed to slide and rotate in several directions. When it stops moving well it settles forward and up, and opening the upper back won’t hold the shoulders in place by itself, because keeping them there is the shoulder blade’s job. That half of the picture has its own piece: why your shoulder blades are the other half of your posture problem.

The hips and pelvis play into this too, especially for people who sit most of the day. Hips that have lost extension and rotation tend to keep the pelvis in whatever position the chair taught it. This part varies more from person to person, which is one reason we test it before assuming anything.

How to improve your posture

Two things move the needle. You need more range in the joints that have lost it, and you need strength and control inside that range so your body will use it when you aren’t thinking about it. Everything below serves one or both.

Change positions more often

The best position is the next one. Hours in any single posture, upright or slumped, give your tissues one shape to adapt to. Getting up, walking, or shifting every 30 to 45 minutes does more for you than a perfect chair. Screen height and seat setup still deserve a few minutes of attention, mostly because a setup that pulls your head forward all day makes the default position you sink into worse.

Take your joints through their full range every day

Controlled articular rotations are slow, deliberate circles through the biggest range a joint can produce without the rest of your body cheating to help. For posture, spine, scapular, and neck CARs are where to start. A few minutes each morning shows you where range is missing and keeps you from losing more of it. If your neck is what bothers you most, tech neck is a training problem goes into that region in detail.

Open the range, then load it

Stretching a stuck area can buy you range for an hour. Keeping it takes tension at the end of that range: contracting into the stretch, lifting out of it, holding positions near your limit with real effort. In FRC terms, that’s the gap between passive range (where you can be put) and active range (where you can get yourself). There will always be some gap between the two. The goal is to shrink it to the point where most of the range you have is range you can produce, because that’s the range your nervous system will let you use in daily life.

Strengthen the positions you avoid

Most people who round forward never train their upper back in extension under load, and most people whose shoulders roll in never train their shoulder blades to rotate up and hold overhead. Rows, carries, overhead pressing, and loaded thoracic extension all belong here once the range is there to support them. Loading a position you don’t control yet tends to reinforce the compensation you were trying to get out of.

Train the spine through all of its motions

The spine flexes, extends, side bends, and rotates, and it does each of those segment by segment. Rotation in particular depends on being able to flex and extend first. Training only the tall position leaves out most of what the spine is built for, including the parts you need to carry groceries up stairs, swing a paddle, or turn to check your blind spot.

When to get your posture assessed

All of this works better when you know which joints are the problem. Two people with the same rounded shoulders can have different reasons for them. One has a thoracic spine that won’t extend; the other has shoulder blades that won’t rotate. The drills overlap, the priorities change completely, and spending three months on the wrong area is an easy way to decide posture work doesn’t help you.

That’s what an assessment is for. We measure how far each joint moves when it’s moved for you, how far it moves when you produce the motion yourself, and where those two numbers drift apart. That tells us where you have range you can’t use yet and where range is missing altogether. If you’ve tried the posture tips and keep ending up in the same position, start with an assessment and work from what the numbers say.

References

Written by

Brian Murray, FRA, FRSC

Founder of Motive Training

Motive Training is a coaching studio in South Austin built around assessment, joint health, and strength you can use. Most clients start with the Movement & Mobility Assessment. From there, train with us in the studio, come to a stretching class, or work through the progressions in KINSTRETCH Online.