At Rebound, we see a lot of patients for chronic pain. For many of them, their chronic pain stems largely from poor posture or poor postural alignment. These situations can certainly exacerbate your pain. Let’s discuss the role that posture plays in chronic pain and how you can correct it.
What Does It Mean to Have Good Posture?
What is good posture in the first place? Good posture is also known as a neutral spine, meaning that there’s a natural S curve to the spine. A slight S curve means a mild inward curve in the neck area, a mild outward curve in the upper back, and then another mild inward curve in the lumbar spine. Those areas should be balanced out so that the muscles and the support structures, or the bony structures of the spine, are equally supported. This will prevent one direction or the other from getting too much strain.
Postural Alignment Is Linked to Motion
A dynamic part of postural alignment, particularly around the spine, is that we move in three dimensions. What does that mean? It means that we move from the front to the back, so there’s a plane of motion that goes that way. We move side to side, so there is a plane of motion that goes left to right. And then we also move rotationally, so you can go off in any direction you want. When we say neutral, we’re talking about the healthy range of your planes of motion or mobility.
What Does Good Posture Look Like?
Your posture will be different depending on your position (standing, sitting, or lying down).
- Standing Posture
In standing, good posture would be good alignment from the side of your head to the hip bone, knee bone, and all the way down to the foot and ankle area. In other words, you’d have pretty straight alignment when we’re looking at you from the side.
This would also include the natural curves mentioned above. You wouldn’t be too far forward with the head and shoulders with a rounded upper back. You also wouldn’t have what’s called a sway posture, where the hips would be pushed way forward.
You want to have nice, strong, balanced hips to support the spine and the rest of the body. So in a standing posture, you just want that good neutral alignment mentioned earlier.
- Sitting Posture
In sitting, we’re thinking more about a 90-degree angle. If you were sitting in a chair, your wrists and elbows should be at a 90-degree angle. Your head should be upright. Your visual field should be straight ahead (especially if you’re looking at a monitor or an elevated laptop). Your hips should be at 90 degrees, and your knees should bend down at 90 degrees to the floor, with your feet supported. Those 90-degree angles will support the spine and hold it in that neutral position.
- Lying Down Posture
When it comes to lying down, mild curves are fine. You don’t want extreme curves. People get pain in their neck from sleeping with too much of a pillow or not enough of a pillow to support that spine neutrally. In other words, a mild curve in the neck and in the lumbar spine, plus supported hips and knees are needed to hold yourself in a neutral position. It’s that neutral spine that we’re looking for in defining good lying down posture.
How Physical Therapy Can Improve Your Posture
Chronic pain in your neck, shoulders, and back comes from chronic stress or strain on the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that support your spine. Even the bony structures of your spine can wear out over time due to stress. Being in an excessive forward posture or having sloppy posture in the lower back can compress your vertebrae and actually cause structural changes in your body.
At Rebound, the first thing our physical therapists will do is get you in a nice upright posture with upright alignment. Then we will work on any muscle imbalances you may have. For example, if you have forward shoulders causing tightness in your chest muscles, the solution is to stretch the chest muscles out while strengthening your upper back and abdominal muscles to be able to hold yourself upright.
Why Strength Training Is Important to Good Posture
Postural muscles take a lot of endurance. We’re not necessarily talking about brute strength here, like lifting heavy weights, but those postural or intrinsic muscles (those muscles close to the spine) really need to be able to become active and work efficiently.
You get weak if a muscle gets overstretched. You can also get weak if a muscle’s too short. You want to get those muscles working in their optimal ranges, and you want to turn those muscles on frequently. A simple way to do this is to be aware of your posture. If you get yourself more upright a couple hundred times a day, you’ll be engaging some of the muscles in your lower spine and abdomen to hold yourself upright. You’d also be turning on muscles in your neck, shoulders, and upper back.
At the start, you’ll probably get fatigued and fall back into bad postural habits. But every time you do a repetition by sitting up straight, it increases your endurance and the awareness. That’s one way our physical therapists will help you when you come in for treatment. We will help you increase your awareness of the positions to put yourself in and the muscles that you need to stretch and strengthen in order to maintain a more ideal posture. This will help relieve your chronic strain and pain on your soft tissues and joints, which happens over time with bad posture.
Visit Rebound Physical Therapy for Chronic Pain
You are fighting a battle against the push and pull of gravity every day, and the different movements that you do throughout the day that pull you in one direction over another can lead to stress and pain. Corrective exercises done with our experts at Rebound will allow you to exercise in a way that you want while giving you relief from those chronic, painful conditions.
Give us a call at 785-271-5533 to schedule a free physical therapy screening. We’re happy to do an assessment of your posture and create a postural improvement program to relieve your chronic pain.
