What Even Is Perfect Posture? Plus, How To Find It
As a pilates instructor, these words feel like blasphemy, but they’re true: there is no such thing as “perfect posture”.
Yep, I said it!
Now, there IS a difference between posture that creates tension and weakness and feels terrible- and alignment that helps you go about your day and work out optimally- but as with everything, that’s gonna look a little different on us all individually.
The right posture for your body allows you to transfer load from the upper to lower halves of your body and keep energy flowing freely throughout all the extremities. When we lose this, we get stiff, creaky, achey, and even injured. It’s also v hard to take a proper deep breath when your body is contorted in a non functional way.
As you’ve heard me wax poetic about the magic of breath training before, deep breathing is crucial before even beginning to think about movement because shallow breathing weakens the core over time, strains the neck and shoulders and can invite hip pain, pelvic floor dysfunction, chronic back pain, and promote living in your “fight or flight” state and mess with your ability to manage anxiety, lower your sex drive, and uh ahem, disrupt your bowel sched and if you’re postpartum working on healing a diastasis, you won’t be able to heal that ab separation until you’ve corrected this first.
Find YOUR Perfect Posture
1) Start from the foundation- your feet. With your feet separated hip width apart (literally find your sitz bones to make sure this is happening), and soften the knees. Locking, or hyper extending your knees can stress out the joints and requires less core strength to maintain- which means you’re compensating elsewhere. Make sure your weight isn’t 100% in the balls of your feet, but instead distributed equally through your “tripod”: the pinky toe, big toe, and heel.
2) Become aware of your pelvis, try not to let your tail tuck under so much you’re squeezing your butt to stay upright, and try not to stick your tail out so much you start to arch the low back. Finding neutral standing is a little trickier than laying flat on the mat, but the same rules apply. Ideally, your pubic bones and hip points are on the same plane.
3) Get your ribs to stack on your pelvis. You may think you do that intuitively, but most of us don’t- ESPECIALLY my pregnancy and postpartum peeps because the weight of the growing baby literally contorts your spine by pulling the ribs back and jutting the hips forward to accommodate for the new weight of that petite lil bebé. The opposite habit can happen too- when you think “military posture” that is puffing the chest out unnaturally and throwing off that “stack” in the other direction. It may feel pretty wonky at first, or hard to balance, when you get your ribs over your hips because our bodies are super smart at adapting- but you’re smarter!
4) Same deal with your head. Get your head on top of your ribs. Without reading any further, feel where your head is in space right now. You want your ears to line up with the middle of your shoulder- most of us don’t do that because we love our gadgets and we end up with cranky, stressed out necks and shoulders because of it. Another way to test this is standing with your back ribs pressed against a wall and trying to press the back of your head into the wall. Feels wild, right? Our brains are heavy, about 8-10lbs (it’s all those smarts!) and our cervical spine is designed to support that weight when our heads are stacked correctly, but when we chicken peck it forward, it makes our heads feel 10-12lbs heavier and our oor cervical vertebrae have to scramble to figure out how to make that work- hence pain.
Voila!
That’s gonna look different on everyone, but finding that stack for YOUR body is gonna make a worrrrrld of difference.
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