I'll admit to not reading the entire article here but I think that mostly people mistake posture issues for lack of exercise / being sedentary in general.
If you work out a minimal amount and build some core strength / back muscles etc then you'll find that your posture naturally corrects itself whilst walking, that sitting in a chair for extended periods isn't as rough, etc.
Lifting weights can certainly help, though people who focus on the bench press and neglect their upper back muscles may find that their posture actually gets worse, rather than improves.
(Yet it's interesting, though hardly relevant for most of the population, that bulky upper back muscles can also look like bad posture. In extreme cases, a very well-developed upper back can even result in a mild hunchbacked appearance.)
More to the point, those posture correction devices actually work. The shoulder straps are okay. The Chinese sell a slim metal device -- I've never seen it in the USA -- that fits around your neck and prevents you from looking down and slouching over. That damn thing is like magic. A few two-hour sessions over a few days can markedly improve your posture.
Having a hard time visualizing this. Is it possible to get one from like AliExpress?
Yeah, there are a few of them. I don't know if these models are any good, but it's this sort of thing:
I fixed my recurrent back pain with a 6 mn daily morning, ie. plank, side plank, reverse plank, 1mn 30 sec each.
Posture muscles are not very well known in the general public. Loss of strength due to aging and sedentary lifestyle makes standing, seating, etc uncomfortable.
I've found this to be the case for myself. And "minimal" can be pretty quick - work up to a set of 5 squats with your body weight on the bar, once or twice a week, say.
I must be old or I have a different idea of minimal. A set of squats at ~200 pounds is entirely doable in time, yes, but my guess is it would be non-trivial for much of the adult population. Even when we were doing conditioning in high school I don't recall that a significant fraction of the class was breaking much over 225 or so.
The issue is that people stop exercising at all as adults which makes about as much sense as stopping teeth brushing.
If you just consistently do a little bit of strength training then it never gets hard, you just very slowly tail off in absolute strength which is fine.
The average adult probably also isn’t great at learning for example because they just stop once they finish school.
Gaining reliable access to the equipment can also be tricky depending on your budget, schedule and floorplan. I personally couldn't really get a good habit going until I could purchase the equipment and make it available from home. Prior to that I was intermittently going to a gym but Covid really drilled into me how transient that access can be.
Considering how far you can go with just a few gallons of water, would be nice if there was more innovation in this space to increase accessibility in a safe way. While the bars and weights are one thing, it's ultimately the lack of a rack that makes squats troublesome imo.
I've never had space to store the bar itself, but if I had a home gym I'd be okay with a couple of stands like this:
You have to learn how to bail, but (depending on low vs high bar) you can get pretty confident at it
I meant minimal in terms of time. I get your point though. Still, a set of your 5RM is going to do wonders for many people no matter how strong you already are. And if you're putting a bit of thought into form and diet, I believe most people can work up to around 80kg with a year of practise twice a week.
I find it quite hard to lift myself on any bar. You don’t need a sports club for it though, which is nice.
200lb means a BMI of 25 if you're 6'3", which is like 3-4% of the male population in the US, unless you're taller than that it would probably be a better idea to lower your weight first.
Yes, Americans are fat, the average adult male is 200lb and the average height is 5'9 [0]. They'd be less so if everyone could squat their own weight, especially if that was in addition to the bar itself.
Europeans are a bit lighter, about 10 pounds on average [1]. Sounds like we could all stand to lose weight before taking up lifting.
Many people lack the mobility to squat at all! Correcting this takes considerable time.
[deleted]
Some people are hypermobile and no amount of strength training will fix that. After many years of trying to get various types of ergonomic chairs and standing desks to work I eventually gave up and got a reclining chair.
Completely agree. I'm "late middle age", and while I lift weights regularly, including squats and deadlifts, I am otherwise pretty sedentary and I don't get a lot of "functional" fitness (e.g. sports).
Recently I decided to find a new hobby and started playing the violin. It was a wakeup call that after just a half hour standing playing the violin with my instructor that my back would basically seize up. It was quite embarrassing! Good thing is I got used to it pretty quick, and thanks to violin practice I stand much more than I used to (and plus I added more back and stretching exercises to my workout). As you say, it really takes a minimal amount to improve your strength.
I'll just provide a quick counter to this based on my own experience.
A few years ago I had been in my best shape (daily exercise, cardio and weight lifting) and started experiencing some forearm pain. I thought it was just from over use from typing but i finally went to a physical therapist and found that the pain came from me hunching over on my computer and putting a lot of strain on my fore arms. The posture I took on was a combination of
1. Just leaning in to my computer because I'd be trying to read text or getting "into" whatever i'm working on
2. My upper back not having the endurance or development that I needed to hold up my upper body.
I had to change my exercise routine to give my muscles more endurance to hold my upper back up while seated.
So yea, exercise is definitely going to help but I wouldn't just say it fixes things automagically for you and you could run into posture issues even when you are doing the right things in life. :)
I think the whole industry wrecked our posture, and it goes back to the CRT era.
The CRT monitors were big heavy things that sat on the desk. There effectively wasn't much manoueverabilty in a CRT stand, and only the expensive/later models had them. The CRT was below eye level, so we all tilted our head forward and looked at a downward angle
When flat screen monitors came along, the didn't originally stray far the the height the CRT's were at, but monitor stands slowly started to increase in height over time and things are a bit better now - and the additional options for mounting them in various ways has improved things immensely.
When you're seated or standing at your desk with correct posture, the centre of your monitor should be the same height as your eyes as if you were looking into a mirror. In fact to compensate so many people are looking down at their phone screens we could possibly put the computer monitor even higher to balance things out.
Even at my peak of training for a 50 mile ultra marathon last year my posture was kind of crappy by conventional measures. That being said, I can run 50 miles without stopping just fine and I have never sustained a serious injury during my 15+ years as a runner.
Regular Sunday 10 miles here, then I had the pleasure to experience plantar fasciitis. I love running, but the injuries can be really annoying
Those are completely different muscles, so it makes sense that your posture isn’t different.
> people mistake posture issues for lack of exercise / being sedentary [...]
> If you work out a minimal amount and build some core strength / back muscles etc then you'll find that your posture naturally corrects itself [...]
I'm missing something. Doesn't paragraph 2 imply that the assumption made by people (paragraph 1) is not actually a mistake?
The longer version of what I’m saying is that people think that bad posture causes pain and issues and that if you just sit up straight you can fix that.
In reality I would argue that if you just keep your back, neck etc muscles strong then you will both sit and stand more “properly” without trying (because it will be easier) and also have fewer issues when you don’t.
> No consensus on causality of spine postures or physical exposure and low back pain: A systematic review of systematic reviews
This is an area that appears to need some serious research. It seems entirely possible that "good posture" is an idea that comes from our monkey heritage where standing tall was a way to threaten other monkeys and gain status. Also standing up straight may be inherently unnatural, monkeys don't usually do it, and it might actually be the cause of lower back pain for all anyone knows. In other words, a posture fad may be the primary cause of lower back pain.
> Also standing up straight may be inherently unnatural, monkeys don't usually do it, and it might actually be the cause of lower back pain for all anyone knows.
My understanding is that this is well established fact. We are literally the ape that stood up. The resulting curved spine is fine for running around chasing water buffalo with the bros but poor for the kind of chronic load bearing and heavy use required to build and maintain civilization. People who subject their backs to chronic hard use generally wear them out at relatively young ages (middle age or so).
Almost had to get neck surgery from a BJJ injury + sitting on a computer all day. This was after BJJ training 3 times a week + lifting twice a week. Would wake up with numb pinkies and would experience shooting pains up and down my neck as I was sitting at my computer.
The thing that prevented a surgery for me was simply fixing my posture, by strengthening the upper back and neck muscles. The most effective exercise I've experienced to achieve this is cable face pulls, with a grip that externally rotates the shoulder. You can see an example here[0].
Non-gym related thing that also helps with posture is getting a standing desk. Its not even necessary to stand, but simply having the ability to change the height of your desk is a massive help for getting the correct sitting posture.
i lifted weights to attempt to fix postural issues that i noticed in my 20s. it made things worse
the issue was that i lifted weights to make big number go up, instead of using weights as a support tool to explore muscles in the body
Yup, the same happened to me.
The additional strength didn't do anything to fix my posture. It just let me hold my bad posture for even longer, until another muscle would fail.
You need things like Alexander Technique to retrain how you hold and use your body. And things like myofascial release to undo all the new tension you created from all the lifting with bad posture.
My father was fairly tall, and had a slouch from always ducking (we lived in Africa, and he towered over most people, and was always banging his head).
My mother was always nagging me to "sit up straight."
These days, I have fairly good posture. Part of it, is because I take a 5K brisk walk, every morning, and that helps me to stay straight. Also, I am not that tall, so I don't need to keep ducking.
I also use a standing desk, and like to stand straight for it.
I do feel that I should set the record straight.
When we lived in West Africa, he was unusually tall.
In East Africa, though, he had competition from the Masai and Watusi folks, who tended to be basketball-player tall.
Tall man living in Japan. I know how that feels. It sorta gets ingrained to always do it to some extend because if you mess up once you bang your head on the doorpost.
Of course my own house doesn’t have that issue (you’d think), but the one toilet on the second floor… so even at home you can’t relax the vigilance.
the showers here especially have always made me slouch and I'm not especially tall at 175 cm! It was only after getting a shower where I could stand straight that I realized how much I'd been slouching over the last 17 years due to low shower heads.
That was a hard requirement for the house xD I can deal with ducking when I need to go to the toilet, but the shower absolutely has to be able to hit my head instead of my shoulders.
[deleted]
If you watch those "restored 1920s street scene" videos on YouTube then you'll quickly notice that every single pedestrian has outstanding posture.
And up untill the 1940's spiral fractures in various sports were unknown,The base level of exercise from normal activities starting in early childhood built a more robust skeleton and stronger
muscle attachment points.
Proof would be trivial, as amish and menonite comunities still follow the same practices.....they are not known as slouchers
go look at average city kids, and then go look at the ones bieng raised on biodynamic farms, my joke is that the city kids are soft and grey, but the farm kids look good enough to eat, 2 seconds and you see the healthy glow
> And up untill the 1940's spiral fractures in various sports were unknown
The sports were massively less competitive back then, incomparable to todays variant. The sports as a super competitive and popular past time is recent development. If less people do sport and sport itself is less competitive, less people will get injured.
Also, while people were strong, they were not buffed. The robust build, six pack and big muscles is our ideal. Men were basically thin.
> my joke is that the city kids are soft and grey, but the farm kids look good enough to eat, 2 seconds and you see the healthy glow
Fun fact: cities are overall thinner then rural parts.
Lift weights
Surprisingly enough, the answer to many self imposed human problems
This article brought to you by Big Hunch
I'll admit to not reading the entire article here but I think that mostly people mistake posture issues for lack of exercise / being sedentary in general.
If you work out a minimal amount and build some core strength / back muscles etc then you'll find that your posture naturally corrects itself whilst walking, that sitting in a chair for extended periods isn't as rough, etc.
Lifting weights can certainly help, though people who focus on the bench press and neglect their upper back muscles may find that their posture actually gets worse, rather than improves.
(Yet it's interesting, though hardly relevant for most of the population, that bulky upper back muscles can also look like bad posture. In extreme cases, a very well-developed upper back can even result in a mild hunchbacked appearance.)
More to the point, those posture correction devices actually work. The shoulder straps are okay. The Chinese sell a slim metal device -- I've never seen it in the USA -- that fits around your neck and prevents you from looking down and slouching over. That damn thing is like magic. A few two-hour sessions over a few days can markedly improve your posture.
Having a hard time visualizing this. Is it possible to get one from like AliExpress?
Yeah, there are a few of them. I don't know if these models are any good, but it's this sort of thing:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807449805056.html
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805683337285.html
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806531943305.html
I fixed my recurrent back pain with a 6 mn daily morning, ie. plank, side plank, reverse plank, 1mn 30 sec each.
Posture muscles are not very well known in the general public. Loss of strength due to aging and sedentary lifestyle makes standing, seating, etc uncomfortable.
I've found this to be the case for myself. And "minimal" can be pretty quick - work up to a set of 5 squats with your body weight on the bar, once or twice a week, say.
I must be old or I have a different idea of minimal. A set of squats at ~200 pounds is entirely doable in time, yes, but my guess is it would be non-trivial for much of the adult population. Even when we were doing conditioning in high school I don't recall that a significant fraction of the class was breaking much over 225 or so.
The issue is that people stop exercising at all as adults which makes about as much sense as stopping teeth brushing.
If you just consistently do a little bit of strength training then it never gets hard, you just very slowly tail off in absolute strength which is fine.
The average adult probably also isn’t great at learning for example because they just stop once they finish school.
Gaining reliable access to the equipment can also be tricky depending on your budget, schedule and floorplan. I personally couldn't really get a good habit going until I could purchase the equipment and make it available from home. Prior to that I was intermittently going to a gym but Covid really drilled into me how transient that access can be.
Considering how far you can go with just a few gallons of water, would be nice if there was more innovation in this space to increase accessibility in a safe way. While the bars and weights are one thing, it's ultimately the lack of a rack that makes squats troublesome imo.
I've never had space to store the bar itself, but if I had a home gym I'd be okay with a couple of stands like this:
https://www.decathlon.co.uk/p/mp/york/york-squat-stands/_/R-...
You have to learn how to bail, but (depending on low vs high bar) you can get pretty confident at it
I meant minimal in terms of time. I get your point though. Still, a set of your 5RM is going to do wonders for many people no matter how strong you already are. And if you're putting a bit of thought into form and diet, I believe most people can work up to around 80kg with a year of practise twice a week.
I find it quite hard to lift myself on any bar. You don’t need a sports club for it though, which is nice.
200lb means a BMI of 25 if you're 6'3", which is like 3-4% of the male population in the US, unless you're taller than that it would probably be a better idea to lower your weight first.
Yes, Americans are fat, the average adult male is 200lb and the average height is 5'9 [0]. They'd be less so if everyone could squat their own weight, especially if that was in addition to the bar itself.
Europeans are a bit lighter, about 10 pounds on average [1]. Sounds like we could all stand to lose weight before taking up lifting.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_body_weight
Many people lack the mobility to squat at all! Correcting this takes considerable time.
Some people are hypermobile and no amount of strength training will fix that. After many years of trying to get various types of ergonomic chairs and standing desks to work I eventually gave up and got a reclining chair.
Completely agree. I'm "late middle age", and while I lift weights regularly, including squats and deadlifts, I am otherwise pretty sedentary and I don't get a lot of "functional" fitness (e.g. sports).
Recently I decided to find a new hobby and started playing the violin. It was a wakeup call that after just a half hour standing playing the violin with my instructor that my back would basically seize up. It was quite embarrassing! Good thing is I got used to it pretty quick, and thanks to violin practice I stand much more than I used to (and plus I added more back and stretching exercises to my workout). As you say, it really takes a minimal amount to improve your strength.
I'll just provide a quick counter to this based on my own experience.
A few years ago I had been in my best shape (daily exercise, cardio and weight lifting) and started experiencing some forearm pain. I thought it was just from over use from typing but i finally went to a physical therapist and found that the pain came from me hunching over on my computer and putting a lot of strain on my fore arms. The posture I took on was a combination of
1. Just leaning in to my computer because I'd be trying to read text or getting "into" whatever i'm working on
2. My upper back not having the endurance or development that I needed to hold up my upper body.
I had to change my exercise routine to give my muscles more endurance to hold my upper back up while seated.
So yea, exercise is definitely going to help but I wouldn't just say it fixes things automagically for you and you could run into posture issues even when you are doing the right things in life. :)
I think the whole industry wrecked our posture, and it goes back to the CRT era.
The CRT monitors were big heavy things that sat on the desk. There effectively wasn't much manoueverabilty in a CRT stand, and only the expensive/later models had them. The CRT was below eye level, so we all tilted our head forward and looked at a downward angle
When flat screen monitors came along, the didn't originally stray far the the height the CRT's were at, but monitor stands slowly started to increase in height over time and things are a bit better now - and the additional options for mounting them in various ways has improved things immensely.
When you're seated or standing at your desk with correct posture, the centre of your monitor should be the same height as your eyes as if you were looking into a mirror. In fact to compensate so many people are looking down at their phone screens we could possibly put the computer monitor even higher to balance things out.
Even at my peak of training for a 50 mile ultra marathon last year my posture was kind of crappy by conventional measures. That being said, I can run 50 miles without stopping just fine and I have never sustained a serious injury during my 15+ years as a runner.
Regular Sunday 10 miles here, then I had the pleasure to experience plantar fasciitis. I love running, but the injuries can be really annoying
Those are completely different muscles, so it makes sense that your posture isn’t different.
> people mistake posture issues for lack of exercise / being sedentary [...]
> If you work out a minimal amount and build some core strength / back muscles etc then you'll find that your posture naturally corrects itself [...]
I'm missing something. Doesn't paragraph 2 imply that the assumption made by people (paragraph 1) is not actually a mistake?
The longer version of what I’m saying is that people think that bad posture causes pain and issues and that if you just sit up straight you can fix that.
In reality I would argue that if you just keep your back, neck etc muscles strong then you will both sit and stand more “properly” without trying (because it will be easier) and also have fewer issues when you don’t.
> No consensus on causality of spine postures or physical exposure and low back pain: A systematic review of systematic reviews
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00219...
This is an area that appears to need some serious research. It seems entirely possible that "good posture" is an idea that comes from our monkey heritage where standing tall was a way to threaten other monkeys and gain status. Also standing up straight may be inherently unnatural, monkeys don't usually do it, and it might actually be the cause of lower back pain for all anyone knows. In other words, a posture fad may be the primary cause of lower back pain.
> Also standing up straight may be inherently unnatural, monkeys don't usually do it, and it might actually be the cause of lower back pain for all anyone knows.
My understanding is that this is well established fact. We are literally the ape that stood up. The resulting curved spine is fine for running around chasing water buffalo with the bros but poor for the kind of chronic load bearing and heavy use required to build and maintain civilization. People who subject their backs to chronic hard use generally wear them out at relatively young ages (middle age or so).
Almost had to get neck surgery from a BJJ injury + sitting on a computer all day. This was after BJJ training 3 times a week + lifting twice a week. Would wake up with numb pinkies and would experience shooting pains up and down my neck as I was sitting at my computer.
The thing that prevented a surgery for me was simply fixing my posture, by strengthening the upper back and neck muscles. The most effective exercise I've experienced to achieve this is cable face pulls, with a grip that externally rotates the shoulder. You can see an example here[0].
Non-gym related thing that also helps with posture is getting a standing desk. Its not even necessary to stand, but simply having the ability to change the height of your desk is a massive help for getting the correct sitting posture.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljgqer1ZpXg
i lifted weights to attempt to fix postural issues that i noticed in my 20s. it made things worse
the issue was that i lifted weights to make big number go up, instead of using weights as a support tool to explore muscles in the body
Yup, the same happened to me.
The additional strength didn't do anything to fix my posture. It just let me hold my bad posture for even longer, until another muscle would fail.
You need things like Alexander Technique to retrain how you hold and use your body. And things like myofascial release to undo all the new tension you created from all the lifting with bad posture.
My father was fairly tall, and had a slouch from always ducking (we lived in Africa, and he towered over most people, and was always banging his head).
My mother was always nagging me to "sit up straight."
These days, I have fairly good posture. Part of it, is because I take a 5K brisk walk, every morning, and that helps me to stay straight. Also, I am not that tall, so I don't need to keep ducking.
I also use a standing desk, and like to stand straight for it.
I do feel that I should set the record straight.
When we lived in West Africa, he was unusually tall.
In East Africa, though, he had competition from the Masai and Watusi folks, who tended to be basketball-player tall.
Tall man living in Japan. I know how that feels. It sorta gets ingrained to always do it to some extend because if you mess up once you bang your head on the doorpost.
Of course my own house doesn’t have that issue (you’d think), but the one toilet on the second floor… so even at home you can’t relax the vigilance.
the showers here especially have always made me slouch and I'm not especially tall at 175 cm! It was only after getting a shower where I could stand straight that I realized how much I'd been slouching over the last 17 years due to low shower heads.
That was a hard requirement for the house xD I can deal with ducking when I need to go to the toilet, but the shower absolutely has to be able to hit my head instead of my shoulders.
If you watch those "restored 1920s street scene" videos on YouTube then you'll quickly notice that every single pedestrian has outstanding posture.
And up untill the 1940's spiral fractures in various sports were unknown,The base level of exercise from normal activities starting in early childhood built a more robust skeleton and stronger muscle attachment points. Proof would be trivial, as amish and menonite comunities still follow the same practices.....they are not known as slouchers go look at average city kids, and then go look at the ones bieng raised on biodynamic farms, my joke is that the city kids are soft and grey, but the farm kids look good enough to eat, 2 seconds and you see the healthy glow
> And up untill the 1940's spiral fractures in various sports were unknown
The sports were massively less competitive back then, incomparable to todays variant. The sports as a super competitive and popular past time is recent development. If less people do sport and sport itself is less competitive, less people will get injured.
Also, while people were strong, they were not buffed. The robust build, six pack and big muscles is our ideal. Men were basically thin.
> my joke is that the city kids are soft and grey, but the farm kids look good enough to eat, 2 seconds and you see the healthy glow
Fun fact: cities are overall thinner then rural parts.
Lift weights
Surprisingly enough, the answer to many self imposed human problems