I asked a physio how to fix my bad posture

“Your best posture is your next posture.”

Have you ever sat down at your desk and started working only to realise, about an hour or so in, that your shoulders have gradually crept their way up to sit somewhere around your ears? Me too. 

A lifetime of bags containing my entire life slung over one shoulder, feet squeezed into high heels and hunching over a computer for my job all day has blessed me with what everyone in my life likes to call “bad posture”.

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Knowing that my posture woes are not unique, I decided to reach out to a posture expert to source some tips and advice on how to correct a lifetime of supposedly bad habits. What can I do to make me sit up straighter and ease some of the shoulder and neck tension I’m always carrying? What I found out was surprising. 

I spoke to Kevin Wernli, a musculoskeletal physiotherapist with a PhD in researching how movement and posture relate to back pain. The first thing Kevin tells me is that the idea of bad posture is a myth. He cites research conducted in 2021 by Curtin University that concluded that females in late adolescence who sat in a slumped position compared to an upright one had a lower risk of persistent neck pain as young adults.

A 2022 study determined that people with back pain return to a more normal, slumped sitting position as they recover from lower back pain. In fact, Kevin said that often sitting up “tall and straight” is “overprotective”.

“The belief that bad posture is bad for us is a myth. There’s not a link between how we sit and pain,” he tells me. Kevin explains it’s less about how we sit and more about how long we’re in that position. His motto is “Your best posture is your next posture” and says it’s important to focus on “alternating [your] posture”.

When I mention my shoulders around my ears issue and ask for his top tips, Kevin says that rather than looking at it as ‘How do I fix bad posture?‘ I should reframe it as ‘How do I change tension?’. It’s the tension of the sustained position that often causes pain.

Kevin places emphasis on managing the pain holistically, telling me “You have to look after your whole health to remain healthy”. He points out that in many instances, hunching my shoulders into my ears would be a response to external triggers like stress or worry (i.e. being at work or driving in tough traffic). 

The second thing Kevin recommends is “strengthening overstretching”. He points to exercises like bent-over curls and bent-over flys that can be beneficial in strengthening the back muscles to better support us.

On the topic of stretching, Kevin suggests that we stretch back over an object like a bosu ball or a chair to open up our chests. When I ask Kevin about posture harnesses and whether they can help train us to change our posture, he tells me if they help people to change position, they can be beneficial but the risk people run is becoming reliant on them. 

“Pain and discomfort is not a quick fix [and posture harnesses can] stop your body doing what it naturally should with your own muscles,” he explains.

Now, all this isn’t to say that Kevin is advocating for us to hunch over our computers in full goblin mode but there is definitely something to the idea of changing the way we think about bad posture, something that often hangs over our heads as something hideously dangerous and destructive to our bodies.

If we approach posture as something more malleable and take a step away from the idea that we all need to be standing upright enough to balance books on our heads when we walk, we might relax a little bit and hopefully, our shoulders will follow suit.

For more advice on improving your posture, head here.