Why you do not need perfect posture

I will sometimes hear from people who want to improve their posture with the thought that doing so will make them feel a lot better. While improving posture may make some people feel stronger and might positively affect their self-perception, I have not seen many people be successful in largely improving their posture, at least in just a period of several months. Fortunately, I have seen many people who are unable to change their posture but are able to get rid of pain around their joints and muscles that they thought were attributable to their poor posture.

But how could people get rid of their pain if their posture is bad?

You see, posture just refers to the position of your body and the joints. Some aspects of your posture are thought to result in more stress on certain parts of your body. An example of this would be if you had a hunched posture, resulting in having your head out in front of your body. Because your head is positioned in front of your body, the muscles of your neck need to work together and maintain muscle contraction to support your head. For some people with weak neck muscles, this can result in neck pain. Fortunately, by strengthening such muscles, you can make them able to withstand the demands that they have and prevent them from being excessively strained and painful.

Does this mean that I should not worry about posture?

Not necessarily, but it just does not tell the whole story why you may be painful. It is worth thinking about how you may be able to optimally position your body to help your joints. However, sometimes by focusing too much on posture some people can be frustrated when posture does not change. In some cases, joints are positioned the way they are because of changes to your bones, and trying to change this with exercise is futile. An example of this is with wedge-shaped vertebrae that can develop. These changes to your bone shape result in a forward flexed back.