Is Your Posture Responsible For Back Pain?
Ever get up from a chair and feel like The Hunchback? Or get home from standing at a sports event watching your kid and barely be able to move without holding your back?
Is your posture responsible for the back pain? It is a common belief that "bad posture" or slouching leads to back pain, weakness and even damage...but is it true?
More than likely nope.
This is yet another tale the health and wellness industry loves to spin, but research has proven time and time again that one posture is not superior to another. No causal links have been found between posture and back pain.* Pain can lead to poor posture, but your pain isn't stemming from your posture. 🤯
And, here's another tale: Studies show that lifting with a flexed spine, rather than a straight spine, is perfectly safe and actually loads the spine less.** Most of the research that is used as the argument against lifting with a flexed spine comes from animal models (Wade et al. 2014, Wade et al. 2017, Berger-Roscher et al. 2017). We can argue that these observations don’t translate to a living and breathing human being whose tissues are able to adapt to loads they are exposed to!
Here are some examples of things that actually DO influence back pain:
Stress levels
Fatigue
Your beliefs about pain
Believing that your body is weak or somehow malfunctioning
Avoiding certain postures and movements
Staying in one posture for too long
Takeaways:
Your posture doesn't affect back pain, but staying in one position for too long might.
Don't believe everything you read on Google or hear from a wellness professional - read research papers.
Back pain is influenced by a number of things including environment, biology and psychological factors.
While slouching isn't attractive per say, it more than likely isn't going to give you back pain unless you stay in the position for too long. Your spine is not designed to stay in a fixed position...it's supposed to move. So get up and dance!
*https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s43161-021-00052-w
**https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sjpain-2019-0089/html