Does a Posture Corrector really help you develop a better posture and what effects do they have on our posture and our functional movement?

I want to start off this article with a few questions for you, go ahead and answer them quickly for yourself. It will give you an idea of what I’m trying to accomplish here. I often get those questions and see pictures from people in forums asking what’s wrong with my posture? These are questions like “I purchased a posture corrector and have been wearing it for 8h and now my shoulder blade starts hurting. Is that normal?” “I have found the perfect sitting posture and now I sit at work in that perfect straight upright posture, but I still have pain in my lower back.” Maybe you can also relate to these questions. There is a real hype going on about “the perfect posture”. And what appears to be the easiest solution out there? To purchase a posture corrector, only to realize on a second glance that it only makes things worse.

So let’s start with the questions you should ask yourself:

→ Is our body designed to be in a static position for a long time of period?

→Is our body designed to jump, walk, run, turn around, squatting through muscles, tendons, bones, ligaments, fasciasand other structures? I guess the answers are pretty obvious, right?

Let’s go ahead!

→ How many times were you sitting at your desk and your shoulders came unconsciously rolled forward?

→ How many times you persuaded your shoulder blades to stay squeezed together, maintaining what appears to be good posture, but you ended up with pain in your neck or shoulders?

→ How many times were you sitting at your desk while working with your spine in an upright position and ended up with lower back pain?

Can you relate to this habtis? The answers may vary from person to person, but you get my point. Our body is not made for sitting still at our desk. But our body finds its ways to express its discomfort.

Do you see the nice picture with our brain and a strong biceps in Fig.1, which stands figuratively for all our skeletal muscles and our central nervous system? Our muscles do not act autonomously (of course there are exceptions, for instance our heart muscle), but if you want to lift your arm grabbing your cup of tea, the initial command comes from your brain. There is always a feedback loop going on between your brain and your muscles. What you don’t see in this muscle-brain picture, in order to allow this ongoing communication, our brain needs information. Means our central nervous system wants information which it can analyze and interpret in order to be able to decide what to do. When you need to decide on a car insurance policy, the first thing you need is information. You want to collect all the information you need to make for yourself the best decision. The less information you have the less confident you will feel about the decision. At least that’s the case with me, I want the facts first.

How can we relate our car insurance decision making to our central nervous system? We have thousands of receptors in our muscles, tendons, fascias, joint capsule that are measuring and collecting the whole time Information (always, it never stops) and noticing any change that occurs in the position of our limbs, our joints, our muscles. If we are constantly in a certain position longer periods of time and we don’t move as desired by our body, those information may no longer be accurate. There is less information to analyze. That’s what you can see in Fig.1 as “Neuromuscular Changes”. When we sit longer time, every day, there is less movement and consequently less information that our brain can analyze and interpret. Proper decision making becomes difficult. Our brain thinks our posture with squeezed shoulder blades or rounded shoulders and short pec muscles (chest musculature) is the new default. The function of your muscles follows the form of your muscles. Some muscles are placed in an overstretched position, while other muscles are over activated. Our natural movement pattern can become impaired.

However, some of you want (I hope so:)) to workout out after work or want to play with their kids, want to play tennis just for fun or have to do some repair work on the house. The list is endless with all the things we would like to do for which we need our muscles. Even more important we need well-functioning muscles and valuable information about how we move. I don’t think you want to pinch your supraspinatus muscle (part of your rotator cuff muscles) while playing tennis. However, when the natural function of our shoulder complex muscles is adversely affected, biomechanical movement patterns change and the risk for injury increases. We end up with less mobility and stability in our joints and we end up with diverse compensation patterns of our musculoskeletal system increasing the risk of the occurrence of pain and injury. The apparently good posture we try to maintain during sitting at the desk, with or without a posture corrector, brings us physical discomfort in the long run.

Fig.1[Prolonged Sitting with Static Retracted Shoulder blades]

The same principles can be applied to prolonged sitting with static spine posture (Fig.2), especially if we wear a spinal brace. To be perfectly clear, those spinal braces have their justification in the medical field when someone has had a spine injury, surgery or a certain spinal disorder. However, it won’t solve the problem of lower back pain when we sit too long in a constrained position every day.

Fig.2[Prolonged Static Spine Posture While Sitting]

This video contains also an easy test to feel for yourself how impaired movement patterns can affect your shoulder joint mobility and stability.

So we face the question How do you do recreational activities, such as weight liftig, playing tennis in a safe and efficient manner with “sleeping muscles”, ongoing neuromuscular and musculoskeletal changes and with this sitting posture stored in your brain as the default setting?