Is there such a thing as good and bad posture?
I was working with a new client who was frustrated with neck/upper back pain limiting his ability to participate in recreational volleyball. It was his evaluation and he was informing me of the neck and upper back pain he felt at work and that every time he tried to serve he had right shoulder pain as well. He told me his wife believed it was due to his bad posture. He told me how all his life he had been told he had bad posture also informing me that his job is mainly sitting at a computer.
He asked me “Is there such a thing as good posture?”
I told him “No.”
He was stunned.
No, there is no such thing as good or bad posture. Humans are meant to move. We tend to move less than we did hundreds of years ago. Our hunting and gathering trips are replaced with car rides to the grocery store or an Instacart order. Heating up our house meant going out and cutting wood, not pulling out your phone and increasing the thermostat. Work was not sitting for 8-12 hours in front of a computer in your dining room. These changes put us in a more flexed position.
To compensate for the mid back (thoracic spine) being more flexed the neck (cervical spine) extends. We develop a forward head position where we overuse the cervical extensors. With the cervical flexors not taking more of the load the extensors get overwhelmed and can cause neck pain as well as headaches. Our upper trapezius and pectoralis muscles tighten from this increase demand and pull our shoulders forward. The upper trapezius becomes the bossy person in a group project and overrides the middle and lower trapezius muscles that should be keeping your shoulder blades more down and back to allow plenty of space for the shoulder to move. This combination can cause impingement of the rotator cuff muscles and shoulder pain when serving a volleyball, swinging a golf club, or even reaching for the dishes at the top of the shelf.
The way our life has developed has lead to us favor being in this posture. Therefore we need to work on reversing this position and working the muscles that are not doing their job and letting the ones doing too much relax. We would need to balance through movement. Even if our lives had developed to favor an extended posture we would have the same problem. We would still have pain. Some areas would do too much and others too little. We would need to reverse the position and work the muscles not doing their job and have the ones doing too much relax. The solution would be the same.
This is exactly what we did. My client is now playing volleyball better than before. Rather than worrying about “good” or “bad” posture, he makes time in his day to move. He takes breaks throughout the day at his computer to do some exercises to address the areas that his posture favors less. We worked on a warm up routine before he plays volleyball to get his muscles firing and familiar to a more favorable position for the sport he loves. He now focuses on movement and has less neck, mid back, and right shoulder pain because of it.
As I told my client the day of his evaluation, “At the end of the day there is no “good” or “bad” posture. There is movement. And movement is medicine.”
Do you have neck, upper back, or shoulder pain like the client in this blog post? If you do, please book your evaluation with us today so we can help you move better, perform better, and live the life you want to live!
