Posture and the Alexander Technique:
Good posture is effortless: Stiff posture is bad for your back
Page 2: The truth about posture
Page 3: Four reasons for NOT sitting up
Page 4: Posture that works
Question: “What’s the worst thing you can do for your posture?”
Answer: “Sit up straight”.
You don’t believe me? Judge for yourself.
I’m going to show you how you got bad posture in the first place. (Experience shows this is what usually happens).
Any movement always begins with your head. Your head leads and your body follows. (That’s as it should be). It doesn’t matter what the movement is: looking at something, standing up, walking, talking — even breathing.
What usually happens
You bend your back (or your neck) in order to move your head.
That’s not how your head ought to be moved. It’s just how almost everyone does it, even though it’s bad for your back.
What should be happening
Your head should move freely at the joint between your skull and the top of your spine. It’s anatomical name is the atlanto-occipital joint. Let’s call it your head/neck joint for short.
Moving your head from here is an essential part of effortless good posture. [pedantic note]
Let me show you how this joint works. Put your fore-fingers lightly in your ears and nod your head a few times (don’t nod too far). Notice how your fingers don’t move.
Your whole head is turning about the axis you are marking with your fingers. If your fingers do move, it means you’re bending lower down — bending your spine as you usually do. In that case, try a smaller nod and see how that works.
If you need to look down further than this joint allows, your whole spine should tip forward as one unit, without bending.
Why you don’t do it like that
“If I can do it now, in your experiment, can’t I always do it like that?”
No, you can’t.
The fact is, you stiffen your head/neck joint every time you do anything. Your neck muscles never allow the joint to move freely. The only exception is when, as in the experiment, you are not doing anything else at the time.
Your unreliable kinaesthesia is what makes you stiffen it. You will need to look into this later. For now, let’s stay focussed on the effects of the stiffening.
Since you’ve stiffened your head/neck joint, it won’t budge.
To move your head, you now have to bend your neck. You’ve no choice, so that’s what you do. You do it even to breathe. That means you’re doing it now. It means you even do it while you sleep.
Is it any wonder your spine is bent?
Now you can see why it won’t straighten: you need to stop bending it first — and you don’t. Ever. Not even while you are making an attempt to straighten it!
No wonder your attempts to correct your posture are not very successful. A lot less successful than you could ever imagine, until somebody comes along and shows you. (And since nobody has yet come along and shown you, I’m sure you’re finding difficulty imagining it now).
Pedantic Note
Turning your head to look left or right happens at the next joint. This first joint in your spine is known as the atlanto-axial joint. (Your top vertebra is called the atlas and the second is called the axis).
(The atlanto-occipital joint is called that because it connects the atlas to the bone that forms the bottom part of your skull, the occiput or occipital bone). back to text
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