How To Fix Your Posture And Get Neck Pain Relief!

Poor posture is one of the most common complaints we hear of in the practice and can contribute to neck pain!

Often attributed to a desk based or physical job worked over a period of years and decades, and the question on everybody's lips “How do I fix my bad posture?”

To understand the solution you must first understand the true problem.

It is not because of your job. If it were because of your job you are out of luck unless you want to change careers. I am yet to find a career that has the perfect balance of being active and sedentry in the optimal ratio.

 

Just because it is common for people in desk based roles to have bad posture and experience neck pain does not mean that's the cause. It is very common to be tall if you’re a professional basketball player, however starting to play basketball at your leisure centre will not make you taller. 

So if your job isn't causing your poor posture and neck pain, what is?

The answer is YOU. Not intentionally you, unless you are 6ft 9 and want to be shorter. Instead it is subconscious. 

Posture is the position of your joints and bones, which depends on the length of your muscles, tendons and fascia, which is controlled by your BRAIN.

We can’t control a bone or ligament consciously, we can however control a muscle and this control take place in our brains. Thankfully our muscles do not control themselves, otherwise we would have no control over what our bodies would be doing. That would be a big problem. 

Because we can control when we want to stand up, walk, bend over etc that means our brains control our muscles and our muscles move our bones. 

That means to improve our posture we must address both our muscles AND OUR BRAINS.

No wonder all those back supports, bumpy mats, curvy chairs, stretches and massages haven't provided you with any neck pain relief. They aren’t addressing your brain. 

I know it's weird to talk about brains in healthcare, the only time they are normally mentioned is when something really bad is happening like a stroke, dementia, aneurysms, that sort of thing. 

But a brain is no different than any other tissue. It isn't as black and white as we are led to believe. By that I mean it’s not as simple as either healthy vs unhealthy or optimal vs broken. Instead a brain, much like any other tissue, is a sliding scale of health.

One extremely being super healthy could be pure white, the diagnosis I mentioned earlier like stroke etc are examples of very unhealthy brains which would represent the black end of the scale. 

In between the two there are thousands of shades of grey (not the E.L.James kind).

If your brain health has started to deteriorate, which is the natural progression, it is slowly going from pure white, or a murky grey down to pitch black. 

As your brain health slides down this greyscale, it starts to slowly lose control over the body.  This is the start of poor posture. Instead of keeping optimal balance between the front and back muscles which keep the bolt upright, as the brain slides down the greyscale, the brain turns on our front muscles more, making them short. Consequently this turns off our back muscles pulling them tight. 

This results in our heads hanging forwards, shoulders rounding, backs becoming hunched and so on, which we see as poor posture. 

The conventional approach to neck pain and bad posture is to rub and massage the short muscles and exercise the tight ones.A somewhat logical but flawed approach.

Why? Because this doesn't address the brain function, which we now know is the true root cause for poor posture. 

That means one of two things will happen, any improvements in posture you make through exercises will either be very subtle, which is disencouraging, or if they are large changes