What Good Posture Really Looks Like

“Sit up straight.”

It's the command we've all heard a thousand times, and it's the reason so many people brace, freeze, and hold tension the second someone tells them to fix their posture.

"Pull your shoulders down" isn't much better. Shoulders are designed to work in many positions. Locking them in, or "putting them in your back pockets," restricts important functional movement and limits breath patterns. In practice I also see "shoulders down" creating rib flare, where the ribs pop open on the front side, and a shortened low back. No thanks.

Posture isn't a pose. It's alignment when we sit, stand, and move all day long.

Good posture was never meant to be something you hold still. It's something you carry through movement, through a class, through a normal day of picking things up off the floor and turning to answer someone calling your name. A locked spine that only exists when you're standing at attention isn't posture. It's an awkward photo.

Instead, here's what actually holds up:

Standing Scaffolding

Stack your ankles, knees, hips, ribs, shoulders, neck, and head like scaffolding. You can even close your eyes and search for that scaffolding sensation rather than rigid bracing or locking yourself in place. It may cause you to bob and sway a little. That's fine. Search for where it feels like balanced effort on all sides of your body and your breath is at ease.

Look for breath in your joints. I like to think of my joints as buoys on the water, ready to go with the flow.

For your core

Three cues I come back to, and you can stack them:

1. Draw your pubic bone up and in at a diagonal towards your low back. This might not be a change you can see with your eyes, but it should tone your low belly and open up room in your low back.

2. Keep #1 and add your navel drawing up and in at a diagonal between your shoulder blades. This creates even more deep core connection and space in your spine.

3. Keep #1 and #2 and add melting your sternum, or heart, down and back toward your low back.

Inside your skin it can feel like a long X narrowing front to back. Use this 1-2-3 sitting at your desk, standing in line at Trader Joe's, watching a game, whenever you catch yourself sitting like a cashew or slouching when you stand.

Two more tricks to stop sitting like a cashew.

Instead of commanding yourself to "sit up straight," you might also come back to a couple of specific images as guidance.

1. The Golf Ball 

Imagine your head is a golf ball resting on a tee. Not pulled back, not jutting forward, just balanced in line with the spine. That one cue applies across squats, planks, lunges, and push-ups, and on its own it tends to take a meaningful amount of tension out of the neck.

This cue applies to life too. I'll bet you a nickel that as you're reading this on your phone or computer, your head is jutting forward like a turtle out of its shell. Golf ball. Tee. Keep it simple.

2. Or Try The Drawer 

If your head still juts forward, try sliding your "chin drawer" back slightly. Don't drop your chin, literally slide it back like a drawer sliding closed with ease.

None of these are corrections you hold. They're adjustments you keep making, rep after rep, day after day, until your body starts finding them on its own.

WundaLove, 

Amy