Why almost everyone has poor posture

Fundamental Principles of Biomechanics

If you've ever been told to "stand up straight" or been given other cues to fix your posture, you've probably discovered that it isn't a habit you can simply force into place. If you have an excessively rounded back and you've tried to fix it by stretching or strengthening the upper-back muscles, it most likely didn't work. What's often misunderstood is that the body is a complex network, and by design, asymmetrical.

Biotensegrity is the concept that describes the body as a tensioned network. Each component of your body never works in isolation. Instead, the body is a structure where bones exist inside a continuous web of tension - muscles and fascia.

Understanding biotensegrity matters for two reasons. Firstly, physical stress never acts in isolation but is distributed across the network of muscles and fascia. Secondly, muscles and fascia are adaptive; cells literally reorganize themselves along the path of least resistance to accommodate the physical stress (mechanotransduction).

Here's the part most posture advice ignores. You were never built symmetrically to begin with. Human anatomy is biased to the right, and it applies to nearly everyone. The brain is asymmetrical: the left hemisphere has more cortical motor neurons, which gives it better control over the right side of the body than the left. So timing, sequencing, and comfort are all better on the right.

The organs are asymmetrically packed. The liver and lungs both sit more on the right. If the body were split in half, the right half would be heavier. The diaphragm is asymmetrical too - the right dome is significantly larger and has better leverage on the spine. All of these right-side tendencies are known as the right lateralized pattern. It is what most people have - the orientation of being shifted into mid-stance of gait on the right leg and physically compressed on the right side of the upper body.

Visually speaking, the right lateralized pattern shows up as a higher right hip, a lower right shoulder, the head side-bent left, and the sternum and sacrum facing right. This isn't a flaw; it's just how we were designed. It might be difficult to notice with an untrained eye - it's subtle, but it's definitely there.

This asymmetry only becomes an issue if you get stuck in it. Combined with your lifestyle, environment, genetic predispositions, and past injuries - all feeding into a right lateralized pattern - staying stuck in a compensatory strategy or a specific phase of gait is when it becomes a problem. Fixing your posture means having the ability to move through all phases of gait, to move in and out of the right side and into the left side of the body.

If you have "bad" posture, you're most likely addressing the symptom instead of the root cause. A winged scapula could be the symptom - but biomechanically, it could be driven by something as far away as the pelvis: an anterior orientation sitting in counternutation at the relative-motion level, with the sacrum extended and the innominate externally rotated, driving posterior pelvic compression. Through the connected web of the body, that lower-body pattern works its way up the chain until the upper body mechanics have to compensate for the lower body mechanics.

The asymmetry itself isn't the issue - being stuck in it is. And because the body is a biotensegrity network where nothing works in isolation, getting stuck is never a local event. A pattern that settles in the pelvis pulls on the same connected web that holds your ribcage and shoulders and everything inbetween, so the tension travels until something far away is forced to compensate. That's why poor posture often stems from the place you'd least expect: the spot that looks wrong is usually just the end of the chain, not the start of it. Find and fix the root cause, and everything downstream tends to fall into place on its own.

Practical Guide to Fixing Your Posture

Most people assume the body will physically adapt to a new posture simply because you stretched or worked a muscle. Working a muscle and expecting the bone to settle into place - and the brain to accept it as the new normal - is logically flawed.

The brain decides what position feels safe and available based on the environment, past injuries, predispositions, and lifestyle. The brain is constantly scanning for what is safe and comfortable and what isn't. What's safe and comfortable is what the brain sets the skeleton to, which then dictates how the muscles function, which determines the final posture of the body. In other words, posture is downstream of your nervous system, so that's where the work has to start.

There are two practical steps towards fixing your posture. Firstly, learn how to breathe through a calm nervous system. Secondly, pick the right restoration exercises. These two are inseparable, and they happen in that order for a reason.

For starters, breathing calmly and deeply is something you can do on purpose to get into the parasympathetic state. When taking short and shallow breaths, the nervous system is on alert - it's stuck in the "fight or flight" state. As a result, your nervous system stays in the sympathetic state and refuses to explore and adapt to unfamiliar positions. So breathe calmly and deeply.

Once the nervous system has shifted out of "fight or flight" and into "rest and digest," breathe through postural-restoration exercises that drive the expansion or compression a given area needs. That's how you get out of being stuck in one phase of gait, or out of any compensatory pattern your body has defaulted to.

To figure out which area needs to expand and which needs to compress, you need to go through a series of assessments. Your body moves by alternating between two states: expansion (generally associated with inhalation, abduction, external rotation, and flexion) or compression (generally associated with exhalation, adduction, internal rotation, and extension). The goal is to identify the compensatory strategy a region is stuck in - then to compress areas that are biased towards expansion, or expand areas that are biased towards compression.

Test the body to find where that access is missing, then choose a restoration exercise that biases the exact expansion or compression it has lost: driving expansion into the area that can't open, compression into the area that can't close. From there, it's a continuous process of testing, restoring, and re-testing.

The more comfortably you can breathe through new, biomechanically unfamiliar positions - through the parasympathetic nervous system, the "rest and digest" state - the better your body adheres to these unexplored positions. That adherence is what restores lost movement, and practicing postural-restoration exercises is what breaks down old compensatory strategies. When your body feels safe and your breathing is slow, that's the moment an old habit of breathing and moving breaks, and a new one forms.

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You can't change what you can't see. Your biomechanics is specific to you - where you're expanded or compressed, which phase of gait you're stuck in, your unique scapulohumeral rhythm. That's hard to feel from the inside, and it's why generic stretches or exercises don't help with fixing your posture.

My co-founder and I are building Align, a companion that helps you work on your posture for good. Point your phone camera at yourself, take a few physical assessments, and it'll guide you through the restoration work tailored to you.