“Stand up straight”. You may have heard those words over and over again as a child as various people tried to push and pull you into at least giving the appearance of good breeding. While many seem to think this is just because it looks better, there are in fact several good reasons to follow this long-standing order.

The way you stand or sit affects the health of your spine. Your backbone normally carries the weight of your head and upper body with the support of your muscles; force travels down to your lower body and then on to whatever you are standing or sitting on. Now, force likes to travel in straight lines.

When your back is straight, force travels down its length, allowing your back to support itself. This is the way backs are adapted to work, so no harm done (as long as the force is not excessive, but that’s a different story).

If you are hunched up, force will still try to travel down, but you will have turned your neck into a lever. This means that the force will be greatly increased – the weight of your head gets multiplied by the distance it’s away from its point of balance. If your head weights around 5kg, and you’re just an inch off, you are forcing the spine and neck muscles to carry approximately 10kg of weight. That is double what they should be carrying, with just one inch of offset. If you were wondering why your neck hurts after you’ve been sitting down for a long stretch of time, there you go.

Other effects of bad posture

The extra weight causes the muscles of the neck to tense up, which is enough to cause pain and headaches in mild cases, and more severe complications in worse one. But of course the bad news doesn’t end there! Where the head goes, the body follows. Since your head is at one end of the kinetic chain (that’s a fancy way of saying that it’s connected to everything else) for your spine, changing the position of your head pulls everything else after it. When you reach the limit of the range the neck can move, you start compensating with your shoulders, then your chest, then your back, and so on all the way down the chain.

Your internal organs are also affected. When you’re scrunched up, all these squishy meat bags are squashed together. This reduces their efficiency. Imagine you’re trying to work in a cartoonishly crowded train. It’s pretty much the same thing, and can cause you no end of problems with breathing, circulation and digestion, many of which are extremely irritating in the best of cases.

Just to clarify, when we say that you are keeping a straight back, we mean that you can trace a straight line from the middle of your head through your shoulders to your hips. In the neutral position, a healthy spine will have a slight curve to it under these conditions. This is natural and you don’t need to try and stand like you swallowed a pool cue.

Posture and strength

So keeping a proper posture is good for your health, but what if we told you that it can also make you stronger?

Maintaining posture involves the engagement of a whole lot of small muscles in your body. These muscles constantly stretch or contract to keep you balanced and in position, as well as supporting your spine. Allowing them to work gives them a constant, all day workout, as opposed to scrunching up which will give some of them a semi-permanent stretch and all the others a semi-permanent contraction.

If you have been working out and then slouch around while you are recovering after an intense workout, this may get even worse as your muscles will heal into that position, making it the default form for them.

Posture in exercise

There are also mechanical factors in play. The transfer of forces which we mentioned earlier works both ways, so a straight back will also allow you to transfer force more efficiently from your lower body to the upper. This is crucial in many sports and physical activities.

The alignment of your spine comes into play in most exercises, whether you use weights or not. If your spine is not straight (or neutral) then your body will compensate by tensing up different parts, loading up different muscles. In most cases this will make exercises less effective, because there just isn’t as much stress on the muscles you think you’re exercising, but it could also end up in pain or injury, because stress is going in the wrong places.

If you need any more incentive to make some effort and stand tall, it also has a psychological effect on others! Standing straight maximizes your height, making you look and feel bigger and more confident.  Who do you think gives a better impression, someone who strides in, head up and chest out, or someone who seems to be trying to curl up into a ball?

Header image: “Photograph of a military band playing and troops standing at attention on the South Lawn of the White House, with the Washington Monument in the background, during a ceremony at which President Truman awarded Presidential Unit Citations to eight U.S. Navy aircraft carriers.” by Abbie Rowe for the National Archives and Records Administration. Public Domain.

Thanks go to Franco Davies for demonstrating the different forward head postures and sitting postures.