How long does it take to correct your posture?

If you just want to get a visible improvement in appearance, you can see obvious changes in 4-8 weeks if you find the right method.； If you want the correct posture to become a muscle memory that does not require deliberate reminders, and completely change the deep compensatory habits, it generally takes anywhere from 3 months to 2 years.

I met a girl who worked in new media last year. She had just graduated a year ago. She carried a camera and ran for interviews every day. When editing, she curled up in a chair and curled up like a shrimp. Her rounded shoulders were particularly obvious. Wearing a slightly tighter top made her appear to have gained ten pounds in her upper body, and her neck was even shorter. She listened to the advice and did 3 sets of shoulder-sinking exercises every day when she was fishing at work. She stood against the wall for 10 minutes when she got home from work, and spent half an hour on the weekends practicing lower back activation. The full schedule counted for 6 weeks. The last time I saw her wearing a sling to go out, her shoulder line was so flat that it was like a special effect. Even her mother asked her if she had secretly done any medical beauty treatments.

But not everyone can be so fast. At the same time, she consulted me for a design boy who had been doing homework lying on his stomach since junior high school. He had been hunched over for almost 10 years, and was also accompanied by mild thoracic scoliosis. Not to mention 4 weeks, he was finally able to stand up straight without feeling tired until the third month of practice. Before, he had pain in his back within ten minutes of deliberately raising his chest. It took almost a year and a half to fully adjust to the point where it does not rebound.

There are actually quite different opinions on the length of correction within the circle. Friends who do sports rehabilitation always tell me that many people feel slow because they haven’t found the right root cause of the problem. For example, rounded shoulders cannot be cured by practicing hard on the back. If the deep serratus anterior and middle and lower trapezius muscles will not exert force at all, no matter how many high pull-downs you practice, you will abuse the trapezius muscles. On the contrary, they will become stronger with more training. If you find the right activation point, some people can even feel their shoulder line moving down in two or three weeks. But the bone-setting teacher had a different view. He said that many people's skeletons were already crooked, and the muscles were pulling on the bones and they couldn't go back. He had to first set the bones to straighten the bone structure. On the spot, you can see that the head can be extended forward and retracted by two centimeters, which is faster than two months of practice. I once had a friend with a stiff neck who had his neck straightened twice. The crooked neck was straightened on the spot. Unfortunately, he still slumped on the sofa with three pillows and checked his cell phone. Within a week, it was back to its original shape, which also confirmed another point of view: just adjusting the bones without training the muscles is fast, but it cannot be retained. There are also many bloggers who advocate "natural correction" and feel that there is no need to make time for training at all. When sitting, remind yourself to tighten your abdomen and shoulders, don't hold your chest when walking, change to a harder mattress, raise the computer, and you can slowly change it. This is really not burdensome, but the results are slow. It may take half a year to see the change, but the advantage is that it is not easy to rebound once you develop a habit.

To be honest, how long it takes depends on your situation. If you only have a temporary posture problem caused by overtime work in the past six months and have no organic deformation, you will definitely adjust much faster than someone who has been stooped since childhood and already has scoliosis. Taking 15 minutes a day to practice seriously is not the least bit less effective than doing it once a week. What I was most afraid of was taking a detour. When I turned around and stretched forward, I followed the online practice of rice-shaped exercises. After practicing for half a month, my neck hurt so much that I couldn't lift it up. Later I found out that the curvature of my cervical spine had straightened, and the head-raising movement was not suitable for me at all. So I switched to chin-tuck training, and raised my office computer by 10 centimeters. After 3 months, it was almost back to normal. All the hard work of the previous half month was wasted.

When I meet friends who come to me and ask me "How long will it take to get better?", I won't give them a chest beat to set a time limit. Instead, I will advise them not to be too obsessed with the duration. Don't just look in the mirror to see if there is any change after practicing for three days. Instead, they will easily give up due to anxiety. You treat corrective actions as a trivial matter like brushing your teeth every day. When you have nothing to do, you sink your shoulders. After sitting for a long time, you stand up and tuck your abdomen. Before you know it, the next time you take a group photo, you will find that you are the tallest one in the group. After all, the purpose of correcting your posture is not to achieve any KPI. It is just to stand without getting tired, to look good in clothes, and to have less waist and back pain. It doesn’t matter if you go slower.