What is the significance of posture correction?

The core meaning of posture correction is to find your own balance between "normal physiological functions" and "self-feeling comfort" - you don't have to cater to the "standard posture" that is concave and anti-human to the aesthetics of Internet celebrities, nor do you allow long-term bad posture to cause irreversible chronic damage. The ultimate purpose of all adjustments is to serve your own quality of life.

Not long ago, I met a young girl born in the 2000s who was just a sophomore. In order to practice the "right-angled shoulders" that are so popular online, she stood in front of the mirror for half an hour every day with her shoulders raised. She persisted for half a month to relax her muscles. Her trapezius muscles were as hard as two frozen stones. It hurt to lift her arms and put on clothes. She asked me with a sad face, "Don't you say that good posture means good-looking? Why do I feel more uncomfortable the more I practice?" You see, this is to regard "good-looking" in public aesthetics as the first goal of posture correction, which completely reverses the priorities.

There is a lot of controversy about posture correction on the Internet right now. Both sides go to extremes: either they are the mythical theory that "correction can cure all diseases", saying that headaches, crooked face, waist pain, and even constipation are all caused by poor posture, and that they can be cured after a week of practice.； Either it’s the useless theory of “it’s all IQ tax”, saying that as long as it doesn’t hurt you don’t need to worry about it, it’s all made up by businesses to make money from anxiety. I can find solid counterexamples to both statements in the cases I have come across.

There was a young man who was doing back-end development. He was dizzy for almost two weeks. He posted a short video and said that he was compressing the vertebral artery by stretching his head forward. After a week of practicing the head-up movement, he was so dizzy that he could not even sit on the subway. When he came to my place, I felt that the curvature of his cervical spine was not bad. I suggested that he go to the otolaryngology department for examination first. In the end, he was diagnosed with otolithiasis. He was not dizzy the same day after the reset. It had nothing to do with his posture. Don't tell me, there are really too many people who blame their physical discomfort on their physical condition and ignore the real cause, which in turn delays things.

Of course, this does not mean that posture correction is completely useless. I have an old customer who has been driving an online ride-hailing service for 8 years. He has been sitting in the driver's seat all year round. His pelvis tilts backwards and his waist straightens. In the past few years, he always said "if it doesn't hurt, it's fine." Every time I asked him to adjust his sitting position, he ignored it. Last winter, he suddenly couldn't take orders. He said that his whole right leg was numb when he stepped on the accelerator. I was not motivated, so I went to take a X-ray to find out that the lumbar disc herniation had compressed the sciatic nerve. I then underwent three months of rehabilitation and adjustments. I usually drive with a lumbar support and get out of the car to move for five minutes every two hours. Now after driving for a day, my waist is not so stiff that I can't straighten up like before.

Interestingly, practitioners in different fields actually have quite different judgment standards for posture correction. Friends who engage in sports rehabilitation always tell me that as long as joint mobility is normal and muscle force is balanced, even a little rounded shoulders are not a problem at all. For example, many swimmers have mildly rounded shoulders. This is a normal posture brought about by the characteristics of the sport and does not affect sports performance at all. ； Physiotherapy teachers will pay more attention to the alignment of biological force lines to avoid joint degeneration caused by long-term compensation. For example, people with knee buckles who run and jump for a long time are indeed more likely to wear their meniscus than ordinary people. ； There is also the body awareness school that has become popular in recent years. It rarely even mentions numerical standards. It advocates that you follow the feelings of your body and do whatever is comfortable for you. There is no need to stick to dead indicators such as "ears aligned with the acromion."

I have been doing posture adjustment for almost 6 years. To be honest, the problem that is really worth your time to adjust is never whether the side photo can match the standard line on the Internet, but the small details that really affect your life: such as bending down to pick something up and it hurts your back, holding a baby for half an hour so that your shoulders are so sore that you can’t lift it, walking in high heels for ten minutes and the inside of your knee hurts. These are your body’s distress signals and you need to make adjustments.

What many people don’t realize is that posture correction also has a hidden function, which is to help you re-establish a connection with your body. I have come into contact with too many people. I usually sit in front of the computer at work and my shoulders are so high that I almost feel them touching my ears. My breathing is so shallow that only my chest is moving. I don’t even know that my stomach is feeling tight. Only when I make adjustments will I suddenly realize: “Oh, it turns out that my shoulders are heavy when I relax.” “It turns out that my stomach bulges out when I take a deep breath.” This kind of awareness of the body is actually much more useful than the angle of your shoulders. It allows you to adjust in time when you first feel uncomfortable, instead of having to wait until the pain is unbearable before you think of treatment.

Don’t think that posture correction is such a troublesome thing. You don’t need to spend an hour every day to practice this or that. For example, if you sit for a long time at work and can't help but slump in the chair, don't force yourself to straighten your back like a primary school student in class. Doing so will hurt your waist if your core is stretched for too long. Get a suitable lumbar support and get up every 40 minutes to grab a glass of water and shake it for two minutes. It is much more effective than sitting in the "standard sitting position" for two hours. If you just like to go home from work and sit on the sofa and feel paralyzed, and you feel no pain or soreness after paralysis, then paralysis is just paralysis. No matter how big the problem is, there is no need to have any "postural anxiety".

After all, posture correction is never about putting some uniform shackles on your body, nor is it about letting you live within other people's aesthetic standards. Its ultimate meaning is that you can comfortably climb three floors without gasping for breath, hug the person you like, and eat hot pot with friends for two hours without back pain. Your own comfort is more important than anything else.