Eli5 Why does bad posture feel so…. good.
In: Biology
Not a doctor, but someone who’s had a lot of physical therapy; here’s my understanding of why this happens.
Holding your body in place to do any activity, whether it’s standing up straight or sitting up for work or walking or doing a sport or whatever, requires the use of muscles (obviously). If the “correct” muscles for doing that thing are weak, other muscles jump in to compensate, but this can lead to problems like soreness, body parts not being at a healthy angle to one another, or injuries being more likely.
A lot of these muscles are stabilizing muscles we never see, feel, or think about until something goes wrong.
A recent example for me is that I was having knee pain, and my physical therapist told me to work on strengthening my hip adductor and abductor muscles, because even though it’s a different body part the overall way I was holding my leg was affected by the weak hip muscles and it was putting excessive strain on the knees.
Another example is that low back pain can be caused by any number of muscles being weak or inflexible, from your shoulders to your abs to your back muscles to your hips to your glutes. The low back ends up either picking up the slack and doing extra work, or being at an angle it shouldn’t as a result of not being supported. But because the low back is tired out by all this, it feels like a relief to hunch over or stand at a weird angle, when what you need to resolve the problem long term is to improve your core strength and stretch more. Which is counterintuitive because it can feel more uncomfortable or even painful at first to do those exercises and stretches, but doing them regularly improves your overall back health.
Anyway, my primary recommendation is to work with a physical therapist who’ll see you on an ongoing basis and teach you exercises and stretches to help with the situation, but if you can’t do that or want to try solving the problem on your own first, try looking up “core stabilizing exercises” (not crunches! Those are for people who want to look like they have abs but they’re too targeted for this) and some stretches for whatever body part feels sore or overtired, and spend 5-10 minutes a day doing those exercises and stretches.
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