Posture cannot be stressed enough for all physical activity. Be it activities of daily living or activities that are athletic in nature. Posture is the position from which movement begins and ends. The better your posture, the better your movements.

Poor spinal alignment is often caused by muscular imbalances where there is some tightness and/or weakness somewhere in the body. An example would be tight hip flexors, which really throw off the mechanics of the spine. Your hip flexors are the muscles that allow you to lift your knee and thigh forward. If these muscles are tight and you attempt a lunge, then your pelvis will be pulled forward into an anterior pelvic tilt. This will lock up your lumbar facets in your lower spine, which will halt your ability to rotate your trunk while in a lunge position. In an everyday kind of situation like shoveling snow, this could prove to be a problem, because the person lunging down to shovel snow will now overuse his or her arms and shoulders due to the lack of rotation in the trunk. Having good twisting ability in the trunk is what allows you to shift your bodyweight into an activity, thereby reducing the amount of stress on just your arms.

This twist pattern becomes very important for certain athletes as well like the boxer and baseball pitcher. I mention this in the “Fighter Athletics” page where good body mechanics (hip torque and trunk rotation) can increase your striking power by at least 25%. When you can apply body mechanics you are not just throwing an arm punch, but are instead engaging the entire body in that movement. The boxer typically twists while standing up, but a baseball pitcher must twist while in the lunge position. If the pitcher can’t twist well in a lunge, then he will throw with his arm instead of using proper body mechanics. That will greatly diminish his speed and power, as well as put his shoulder at risk from the tendency to overcompensate with it. Some pitchers throw their arms out for this reason.

This is why when beginning an exercise program, posture and the muscular imbalances that cause it must be addressed first and foremost. We don’t want to train from a position of poor posture. If we do, we are training what is known as a faulty motor engram. Your nervous system will basically seek out this poor posture as the foundation from which to perform the movements being trained when they are encountered in everyday life or sport. The nervous system is being conditioned to activate muscles to move you in an incorrect way, which is why corrective strengthening and stretching must be employed first. This will increase your overall strength and functional capacity while protecting joints by properly attenuating forces throughout your musculoskeletal system. You can certainly increase strength on top of poor posture, as we see evidenced in many gyms, but to do this accelerates the pace at which you break down the musculoskeletal system. In the exercise science course “Advanced Program Design”, noted neuromuscular therapist and fitness professional educator Paul Chek uses a good analogy to illustrate this point. You don’t figure out how to make a bike faster by adding titanium sprockets to it when the spokes are all out of balance and the wheels are wobbly. The faster that you ride that bike with wobbly wheels the faster it will break down. Human beings are just the same. It is therefore very much worth it to take some time in the early stages of an exercise program to correct any postural imbalances. Your body must be trained to handle the external loads that the world presents it with, including in your weight training, but it must also handle the intrinsic loads of the body itself such as the weight of your shoulder girdle on your torso. This kind of intrinsic loading is well managed via good posture. In short, the better your posture the less likely you will be injured in your work, sport or any activities of daily living.

There are other very important benefits that proper handling of intrinsic loading via good posture provides. Not only does good posture improve movement, but it also improves visceral functions such as your respiratory system. Consider that your lungs are encased in your rib cage. If you have the very common muscular imbalance of tight chest muscles with weak shoulder blade muscles, which produces rounded shoulders with forward head, then the weight of your shoulder girdle is being brought forward. This presses the rib cage downward, which stretches the scalene muscles causing an increased load on accessory respiratory muscles. In “Advanced Program Design” Paul Chek cites Joel E. Goldthwait’s book “Body Mechanics in Health and Disease” where Goldthwait states that poor posture may reduce respiratory volume by as much as one third. If you have ever taken a CPR class, then you were taught to lift the chin and tilt the head back in order to open the airway when checking for breathing in an unconscious victim. That is the first step in the ABCs (Airway, Breathing, Circulation) of CPR. Other visceral dysfunctions that can be sourced in poor posture are varicose veins, incontinence due to advanced disc bulge in the lower back, and even headaches (pain the in brain).

Now without getting too technical or biological, let’s take a brief look at how the brain and spine work. Your spinal cord and brain make up your central nervous system. The brain is the center of sensory awareness, movement, emotions, rational thought, behavior, memory, speech, language, planning, foresight, and interpretation. The spinal cord is an extension of the brain. It is the receiver of sensory input below the head, as well as the source of motor commands for muscles below the head. It attaches to the medulla of your brain stem in order to send messages from and to the brain. The brain stem also contains the thalamus and it is here where your conscious state (awareness) is regulated and maintained.

You experience the world through your senses and that information is sent to the brain via neurological messaging where the brain determines an appropriate response. That response or reaction will then be sent to the appropriate part of the body or to the body as a whole, if necessary. The fight or flight mechanism occurs here. Having optimal messaging back and forth is obviously the ideal condition for all sorts of situations. It is good posture that allows for that kind of inner bodily communication to take place freely. We are looking to improve the ability of the brain to communicate with various muscles.

The brain only understands movements and not particular muscles. With neural messaging being at, or close to optimal, the brain will activate all of the appropriate muscles necessary for a certain response to a condition. Whether you think about the movement or not, is irrelevant in some cases. The next photo demonstration, which you can try with someone, is a perfect example of when your conscious thinking isn’t a major component. The brain will simply know what to do and when to do it, if you first create the condition for it to do so. This is where posture comes in.

For years I knew the importance of good posture for general fitness and athletics from my exercise science training, but it wasn’t until I took a couple of classes with a Daoist Internal Arts Master that I got a great demonstration of the dynamic power of good posture, particularly when it came to awareness. That demonstration, which I was used for, is replicated in the following photos and described in the subsequent text.
This position with the two arms making contact is known as the reference point in the martial art of Wing Chung, also used in Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. This is known as sensitivity training, because we are listening or feeling each other’s energy for movement. When a movement is felt an appropriate response taught by the instructor is delivered. In this case, when my partner feels me attempting to shoot a straight body punch with the arm that he is making contact with, he will deflect it before I can make any kind of contact with his body. What allows him to properly deflect the blow is his posture. When he stands with the sternum slightly raised creating the natural “S” curve of his spine, he is able to become more aware of my movements. When I move my arm toward his ribs, it’s as if his body acts on its own and deflects my arm. His awareness is heightened by the ideal neural-messaging condition that he created simply by standing in good posture. The sternum becomes a great guide for this ideal posture. Keep the sternum slightly lifted when performing this and most other exercises.

Now on the other hand, if he depresses his sternum, even just a little bit, where his shoulders are just slightly rounded, he will not be able to deflect my strike as quickly. There will be a slight delay (Again, you can try this with a partner with practically no force or pressure to assure safety.) It may be a very subtle difference, but that is all it takes for someone to get in a good strike or for you to not respond well in an off balance situation causing you to fall and injure yourself. Often times very small changes to technique and form make a substantial difference in the proper execution of physical activity. It is the small corrections that I make with people that alter their experience of an exercise and of their bodies. This obviously leads to improved body awareness.

Recall that awareness is housed in the brain stem, which attaches to the spinal cord as an extension of the brain. It is for this reason that all meditative practices such as Yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, Zen, Kung Fu and other martial arts, demand that you keep your posture straight (It’s really the natural “S” curve of the spine). Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn author of the best-sellers “Full Catastrophe Living” and “Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Daily Life” ran a mindfulness based stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center for years before recently retiring. He dealt with a very wide array of conditions. When beginning to teach meditation he would tell his patients “Sit with dignity.” They immediately straightened up. There resides within each of us an internalized definition of dignity that when expressed physically, we tend to straighten up and walk with our heads and chests high. It is a position of confidence and personal power, which has a corollary effect on physical power. Again, the mind and the body cannot be separated and this becomes apparent when we experience the effects of good posture in dynamic training. With all of the 31 joints of the spine aligned and the mind relaxed, we can exert greater physical, as well as mental power. Good posture is simply the neutral resting position of all of our spinal joints. This grants us access to the experience of no distinction between the mind and the body in physical activity. If you simply bring conscious awareness to your breathing and your posture, then the mind-body (every fiber of your being) will handle the rest on its own. You (the “I”) can very simply get out of the way. Simple, but not always easy. That is why we train--to make it easier to the point where it becomes second nature.

“When you are completely aware, there is no space for conception,