Sep. 08, 2025
Health & Medical
Here are six things you should know about good posture and how to maintain it.
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Posture refers to the body’s alignment and positioning. Long-term “bad” posture—in which the spine and/or limbs are out of alignment—leads to problems with the muscles and bones, which are caused by stress from gravity. Eventually, you will develop pain, soreness and stiffness throughout your body that can affect your daily functioning.
“As a physical therapist, posture is usually the first thing I look at when I evaluate someone,” DiVincent says. “It's almost impossible to treat any issue without at some point addressing the position that the person holds their body in all day. It’s really fundamental to a lot of different conditions and injuries.”
Any time you’re holding your body in a position that’s not optimized, you’re risking strain and injury.
“There are a few important exercises you can do that will make you more mindful of how your body is aligned,” DiVincent says.
The most common posture problem when sitting is called upper cross syndrome. In this arrangement, the head is bent in a forward position. The upper spine has a rounded shape, curving outward at the upper back and shoulders, and shoulders are hunched up toward the ears.
Posture check:
When standing, lower cross syndrome can lead to pain in the lower back and legs. In this position, the lower back is arched and the pelvis is tilted forward. This position leads to weak abdominal (stomach) and gluteal (butt) muscles. The thigh, calf and hip muscles may become very tight.
Posture check:
When lying down, poor posture can also cause back pain and muscle strain.
Posture check:
It’s also important to use good posture when getting in and out of bed. Bend your knees, roll to your side, slide your legs off the edge of the bed and use your arms to push up to sitting.
“Stretching and strengthening have vastly different purposes but are equally important,” DiVincent says.
Stretching is helpful for tissues that have gotten short or tight because they’ve been held in the same position for too long. Strengthening, on the other hand, involves regularly contracting the muscles, which helps to make them stronger.
“When you’re physically stronger, you’re able to hold more load,” she adds. “In this case, the load refers to the weight of your own body.”
Each of these forms of exercise can make the other one more effective: It’s difficult to strengthen your muscles if you don’t have the flexibility to do the exercises that are needed, but strengthening without stretching will lead to more tightness and pain.
Tight muscles can lead to imbalance, in which some muscles are short and strong, and others are long and weak. It can cause pain not only in the muscles themselves but also in the joints and nerve tissues. Tight muscles increase the risk of strain injuries.
With stretching, it’s important to be able to differentiate between a little bit of pain that means you’re activating your muscles and pain that means you’re pushing them too far. “You need to make sure you’re not injuring yourself while stretching,” DiVincent says.
Guidelines for stretching:
Strengthening should be a part of your daily routine in order to maintain proper posture. Weak muscles put joints and other tissues at risk of injury and make it difficult to maintain proper posture. A number of things can cause muscle weakness including injury, immobility, neurological conditions, nerve entrapment and arthritis.
When you do exercises for strength, focus on key areas of your body, including your shoulders and upper back, core, hips and legs. Strengthening work should lead to muscle fatigue, but not pain.
“Mild muscle soreness is normal and appropriate after strengthening,” DiVincent says. “But it’s a good idea to give your muscles a rest day in between exercises.”
“No posture is good for too long a period of time,” DiVincent says. “You may have the best ergonomic situation possible, but if you sit at your desk for 10 hours a day, you’re going to have pain.” She recommends that people check in on their posture every 15 minutes and get up to move around every half hour or so.
Published 12/16/
Not a lot. One review, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Pain, collected results from six studies that assessed posture-correcting shirts. The researchers found evidence that suggests that posture-correcting shirts do change a person’s posture, and might help alleviate pain and discomfort, and even increase energy levels and productivity. But there were some big problems with the studies, says J.P. Caneiro, a physiotherapist and research fellow at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and one of the review’s authors.
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For one thing, the six studies could not adequately assess how well posture correctors alleviated pain because they used participants who were not in pain. “That’s a major flaw in itself,” Canerio says, “because if you’re trying to push something that will correct your posture and will give you pain relief and improve your function, you should be including people that have those problems in the first place to make sure that you’re creating a change.”
In general, the scientists determined that the quality of the research on posture-correcting shirts was generally low, which makes the conclusions of those studies a bit shaky. The takeaway? There’s not currently good quality evidence to support recommending posture- correcting shirts, Caniero says, “especially as a management strategy for musculoskeletal pain.”
The evidence is thin when it comes to electronic devices, too.
Upright, which makes the wearable Upright Go, cites just one peer-reviewed study showing a benefit from its device. That study, published in in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, included 26 college students, 13 of whom chose to try out the Upright device and 13 of whom didn’t. Those that used it reported feeling more energy and less fatigue. But the study, which was in a small group of young people, didn’t assess pain or employ any objective measurements of posture. (Upright did not respond to a request for a comment.)
Several experts I spoke with noted that a lack of evidence doesn’t mean these devices are proven to be useless for everyone—just that scientists haven’t yet been able to show they’re helpful for many people.
Still, some individuals might benefit. You might find, for example, that a posture brace or a wearable provides a helpful reminder to try and keep your spine in a neutral position while you’re working at your desk, says Mayur Jivanjee, a musculoskeletal and vestibular physiotherapist based in Melbourne, Australia.
This is an important question behind some of the promise of posture correctors, and the answer is that no one knows for sure.
“I don’t think we have good evidence about bad posture leading to chronic back pain,” Wai says. He co-authored a study in The Spine Journal that reviewed existing studies on workers who must adopt awkward postures at work (an example: sewer cleaners in Denmark who had to hunch over to work in narrow sewer tunnels). The researchers found little evidence to back up the idea that awkward postures cause back pain.
But other analyses—also synthesizing existing studies—have found the opposite. For example, a analysis in the American Journal of Public Health did find that people whose work required nonneutral back postures (along with other types of exertion, like lifting) were more likely to experience low back pain.
In , researchers writing in the Journal of Biomechanics attempted to pull together the results from multiple analyses of the evidence on posture and physical exertion. The takeaway? The conflicting findings mean that, currently, there’s no consensus about the extent to which postures and other physical factors (sitting, standing, lifting, bending, twisting, and more) contribute to the development of back pain.
Back pain itself is complicated and not fully understood, notes Dino Samartzis, DSc, an associate professor in the department of orthopedic surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He points out that recent evidence shows factors like genetics, demographics, socioeconomics, and even the microbiome can also potentially influence a person’s risk of developing a pain problem.
Not necessarily. The underlying assumption of posture-correcting devices—the idea that there might be one “correct” posture that everyone should seek to achieve—may not be so clear-cut.
For some providers, like Jivanjee, the dichotomy between good and bad posture isn’t particularly useful. He recommends different postures or movements to different people, “based on their work pattern, their body dimensions, and their injury history,” he says.
Several of the experts I spoke with emphasized this same point: that the right posture for you might not look like what it looks like for someone else, or like what you think of as “good” posture generally. OHSU’s Beadnell explains that yes, some people who experience back pain might benefit from adopting less of a slouched posture when sitting at their desk, for example.
On the other hand, some folks might be better off relaxing a bit. “There are people that sit really upright or have what we would think of as really good posture. And usually these are people that were either in the military or had dance training, like ballet especially, or gymnastics, when they really overcorrect their posture,” he says. “And for them being in a more slouched position is actually a much better position.”
There’s one other potential benefit to adopting a more upright posture, according to some research, and it has to do with your mood. There’s clear evidence, for example, that more slumped or stooped postures can indicate a poor mood, and can even be used to help diagnose depression. Some research suggests that the relationship may also run in the opposite direction—that adopting more upright postures might actually help improve mood.
Chilling out about having perfect posture doesn’t mean tossing out all the principles of, for instance, sitting well at work. I checked in with Paul Ritchey, DrPH, one of Consumer Reports’ in-house ergonomics experts, for clarity. He agreed that there’s likely no one perfect posture for everyone. But there are still things you can do to help avoid soreness, strain, and discomfort in your back when you’re working.
Make your workspace more ergonomic. Ritchey suggests setting up your workspace to ensure you can keep your back—and your other joints as well—in neutral positions, or rather, neutral zones (since, again, there’s no exact position that means you’ve achieved a perfect posture).
The advantage of allowing your back to assume its natural S-shaped curve is that this puts the least stress on your joints, intervertebral discs (the soft, flexible material in between your spinal bones), and muscles, and helps you avoid fatigue. This isn’t the same as simple advice to “sit up straight.” For example, ergonomists usually recommend using a quality office chair that’s adjusted for your body and sitting with a slight recline to help support your back in a neutral posture, rather than relying on your trunk muscles alone.
Pay attention to your comfort. Ritchey recommends trying to be mindful of how your body is feeling, whatever position you’re in. “In the office and in your daily life, like when using a smartphone, it’s easy to shrug off a nagging discomfort,” he says. But it’s best not to ignore those little aches or pains, and instead try and find a way to make yourself feel more comfortable.
Don’t stay in one position all day. All the experts I spoke with emphasized that more important than hitting one proper posture is making sure you move around frequently and change things up throughout the day.
Moving around helps nourish your body. It gets your blood flowing, sending nutrients to your muscles and the discs of your spine, Ritchey says. A key tenet of ergonomics is that whatever position you’ve set yourself up to work in, you should try to get up, stretch, and move around, even for a minute or two, multiple times throughout the day—ideally every 30 minutes.
This can also help if you’re experiencing pain that you’re worried about aggravating, says Caneiro. “There is evidence that people with persistent pain are more rigid and moving less,” he says, but freezing up and making yourself more rigid can be counterproductive. “There is evidence that taking that approach of relaxed movement actually provides people with reduction in pain and improvement in function.”
Know when to call in a professional. If you’re experiencing chronic pain, it’s best to visit a provider who can help you figure out what might be causing your pain and what you can do to address it. The solution is likely going to be more nuanced than the oversimplified promise of a posture-correcting device, Beadnell says.
Exercise regularly. The muscles of your core and trunk help support your back, so it’s important to keep them in good condition. Although you might think that means you need to do crunches every day, there’s actually a wide variety of exercises that will help, says Wai. “Almost any form of upright exercise will also work at strengthening the core as well.”
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