What is posture?

What is posture? On the surface level, this question has a simple answer: It’s the way you stand right? Or maybe the way you sit? 

But what does this “way” mean, why are people’s ways so different? Is this something you’re born with? Or Do you learn it? When, and from who? Is it permanent? Or can you change it? Does it change naturally over our life? Why? What impact does it have on performance or injury?

When we look at a person moving, over the course of their life one thing remains the same, they look distinctly, like themselves. Think of someone you know walking or running. Do you think this looked very different 10 years ago? Do you think it will look very different 10 years from now? There is something distinctly “them”, about these movements. Understanding what that actually is, how they learnt it, and how it impacts his performance is a big, interesting topic, and I think it needs much more thought than it is often given.

To explain, let’s start at the beginning, there was gravity, and then there was man. There is no more important force to understand. The thing about gravity is, It’s relentless, it pulls you down 24/7, you MUST support yourself against this force, lest you crumple into a heap on the ground.

Our skeleton alone, can not do this, we need ligaments, tendons, and most importantly muscles, to hold us up against this force. This way of supporting ourselves against gravity, varies person to person, both in terms of the muscles we use, how much we use those muscles, and the position we are in while using them.

But what is consistent, is this way, each individual person does this, the same way, over most of their life. Don’t take my word for this, look at photos of yourself, and friends from 5 years old to now, you will be surprised at how consistent these are. There can be some changes in puberty, especially if you get a lot taller quickly, but people like to do, much the same thing. This way, is something we learn from our caregivers or role models. Children are imitators, and pick up on the patterns that they see around them. Most people finish learning to walk at around 4 years old, and their way is largely unchanged since.

Generally, your way of moving, standing and everything in between, is your pattern. Which is a combination of your preferred positions, and way of supporting those positions. This pattern carries through into nearly every single thing we do. It does not always manifest in the same ways, eg, some people who lean right in standing, will rock left when bending forward, as complex movements make things more complex, but it is still there.

This is your postural pattern, and every single person reading this has one, and it is unique to you, it is an intersection of psychology, biology, and environment. People’s patterns are influenced by their genetic makeup, the size of their bones, muscle fibre distribution and muscle attachment positions. They can also change as a result of psychological factors. For instance heavy bullying, or abuse can cause people to literally shrink back inside themselves, rounding and protecting their organs. Aging also has a major impact. Whatever pattern you start out with, gets stronger and more reinforced with age, if your pattern uses too much flexion, guess which direction you’re going to go as you age?

NOW, you might be asking, so what? 

Let’s go back to myself in the past for a moment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb-75Udxr_Q) . My patterns, my way of supporting myself sucked, and the movement that resulted from those patterns sucked as a result. When I improved my patterns, my support, my unique way of doing things, everything changed. These patterns are the base that everything else rests on.

Each persons unique pattern impacts so much of what they like doing and don’t. Where they hurt, and don’t. What movements they’re good at, and bad at.

Lets take the well known athlete Toby Segar. The position, and way he supports his hips gives him fantastic hip extension, which he utilises for his amazing power output in running and jumping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivg7h5QUod0&t

Or take Callum Powell, he too has his own unique distinct way of moving. His spine position and mechanism of support leads him to put more stress through this area, setting himself up for potential injury: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER84PgUz5rg

Max Cave’s torso position and support sets him up to jump of his left leg, and rotate left on his landings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3SaaXOk8A

Tim champion’s, chest, shoulder blade position and muscular support set him up for fantastic upper body movements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyKgGZMF7KE

Myself as a younger athlete’s terrible position AND terrible mechanism for support set me up for sucking at basically everything. Tight hip flexors, and tilted forward hips, weak glutes, collapsed forward head position, and weak stretched thoracic extensors lead to short, small inefficient steps, which lead to small powerless jumps. A collapsed ribcage and spine lead to weak ineffective shoulder movements. Deeply asymmetrical torso support lead to twisted landings, rotating, painful knees, and huge movement asymmetries. I literally could not rotate right without falling over, or even begin to jump of my right leg. 

We are products of our position, more than we could ever imagine.

If we really want to get different movement results and get rid of pain, we have to learn to LOOK LIKE A NEW PERSON. This is not a causal superficial change, this is radical re-training of our nervous system. We are finding NEW positions, and NEW mechanisms for support. 

Movement happens FAST, most of it automated by the CNS after a certain point, changing this at high speeds, is basically impossible, we need to move SLOW, and deliberately, we need to retrain our CNS.

We need QUALITY feedback, QUALITY information. This is what will allow us to change things.

Let’s look at some examples:

How do you support the weight of your head and torso, what position are they in? They are heavy, something has got to stop gravity pulling them into the ground. 

Lets say, you normally choose a position where the weight of your torso is along way back in space, hips back in space, WEIGHT back in space. OK, how do you SUPPORT a position like this?:

The answer is something like: hip flexors, lumbar extensors, pec minors, and cervical extensors.

Now, what does having these really strong, and more importantly REALLY ENGRAINED IN YOUR CNS, do for you?
Its important to understand, when you use a muscle, what you are really doing, is getting it hard wired in, the more you use any pathway, the better your CNS will get at it, and the more you will use it.

Ok, so you’re using these muscles, you’re good at them, ARE THEY USEFUL FOR MANY MOVEMENTS? Beyond sitting in a chair, and slouching back, the answer, is no, they aren’t great for producing many of the desired movement outcomes.

You would be much better of, if you had used the opposite muscles for support: Your glutes, abdominals, pec majors, thoracic extensors, ALL THESE ARE SUPER USEFUL for many sports specific movements.

You WANT your CNS to LOVE these muscles, BUT these muscles don’t love this position. This position leaves these crucial muscles stretched out, un-unused and underrecruited.

So we’ve got to change the position, AND change the way its being supported THEN you can get these muscles working, functionally, as a result of, and combination with this position.

NOW, this is a spectrum, people aren’t usually ALL hip flexors and weight back, etc, but everyone rests somewhere on this spectrum. Now this isn’t the ONLY way you can support the weight of your torso, everyone has their own unique way of doing this.

NOW, this is just the forward and back element. But there is also a left and right element, unfortunately, our spine MUST bend side to side, its functionally required, but this makes it unfortunately inherently very unstable. So it must be SUPPORTED to prevent this wiggling about like a sock on a washing line. 

If you support the weight of your torso asymmetrically left and right, this too causes a host of problems. There left right patterns are just as ingrained and long lasting in the CNS as the forward back ones, 

Lets look at another example:

I supported the left/right instability in my torso, mostly through the right side torso muscles, right lat etc, and not the left. This was accompanied by a default right bend in the spine. As a result, the left sided support muscles ending up long, disadvantaged and unused. When I went to regain balance left and right, WHERE DID i go to find it? Where I knew how, pulling right, this resulted in lots of problems, especially on landings, but also in take-offs, twisting, and every movement else in between. Only stabilising effectively in one direction causes injury, and poor movement performance.

Now bear in mind, this is not the ONLY way to support left/right, but is just an example to illustrate the kind of issues that can arise.

Your CNS needs to understand, and use BOTH sides of your torso stabilising muscles, equally well, or at least not horribly one-sidedly. 

This is a product of BOTH centralising your torso position, so as to not horribly disadvantage half the muscles by passive stretch, and recruiting the right muscles to support a different position, And then doing THIS ALL THE TIME, in your daily life, retraining a CNS takes a long time, and the only realistic way to do it, is in day to day life, slowly and consistently, with the right information.

So how do you support yourself? What is your position? What is your pattern? Your posture? This is one of the hardest things to see, because it's you, its so normal its practically invisible. Just for a moment try pretending you are looking at a stranger.

Like you’ve never seen this person move before in your life.