Why your online posture advice is probably wrong

If you have ever googled "how to fix my posture" you will have found thousands of results all saying roughly the same thing. Sit up straight. Pull your shoulders back. Keep your chin tucked. Buy a posture corrector that buzzes every time you slouch.

Most of this advice treats posture as a single fixed position that you should hold all day. As if there is one correct shape and everything else is wrong. That is not how your body works, and trying to force it into a rigid position often creates more problems than it solves.

There is no perfect posture

Your spine is not a straight pole. It is made up of segments, each with a natural curve, and those segments are designed to move. The goal is not to stack everything in a perfect line and hold it there. The goal is to create length and space through the spine so the discs between the vertebrae are not being compressed, and so the muscles around them are not gripping to hold you in a position your body does not want to be in.

We are all a bit wonky. One shoulder might sit slightly higher than the other. Your pelvis might have a slight tilt. That is normal. Chasing a textbook-perfect posture that does not account for the shape of your individual body is a waste of energy and can actually increase the tension you are trying to get rid of.

I get asked regularly whether people should buy one of those posture braces that sounds an alarm when they slouch. I am not a fan. Adding an alarm to an already stressed body does not teach your muscles anything useful. It just creates another source of tension. You brace against the alarm, you hold yourself rigidly, and you end up tighter than when you started.

The problem is rarely posture alone

Here is what I actually see in clinic. Someone comes in and tells me their posture is terrible and that is why their back hurts. When I assess them, their posture is usually not as bad as they think. What I find instead is a body that is holding an enormous amount of tension from everything else going on in their life.

Eight hours of stressful Zoom calls with your shoulders up around your ears and your jaw clenched will do more damage than a slightly rounded upper back. Running a household, looking after children, managing everyone's calendar, doing the school run, carrying shopping, driving between activities, and never having a moment where your body is not doing something for someone else. That load shows up physically. Tight shoulders, stiff neck, aching lower back. And when people feel that tension, they blame their posture because that is what the internet told them to blame.

The posture might not be helping, but it is rarely the whole story. Stress, mental load, and a body that never gets a chance to decompress are usually doing more of the work than a slightly wonky sitting position.

Sit up straight is not the answer

When someone tells you to sit up straight, what most people actually do is arch their lower back, pull their shoulders back hard, and lift their chin. They hold it for about three minutes, it feels uncomfortable, and then they slump back to where they were. Nothing has changed.

That is because "sit up straight" does not mean anything useful to your body. It is a vague instruction that people interpret as making themselves rigid. What would actually help is learning to lengthen through the spine, creating space between the vertebrae rather than jamming them together by forcing an arch.

The difference is subtle but significant. Lengthening feels like growing taller through the top of your head. Sitting up straight feels like bracing. One creates space. The other creates tension. I spend time with clients helping them feel the difference, because once you understand it, you stop fighting your body and start working with it.

What actually helps

Movement matters more than position. Your body does not need a perfect posture. It needs variety. Sitting is fine. Standing is fine. Slouching for a bit is fine. The problem is doing any one of those for hours without changing. Your body locks into whatever shape you give it for long enough, and then it objects when you try to do something different.

The most useful posture advice I can give is to change position regularly, build some simple strengthening into your week so the muscles that support your spine can do their job, and stop stressing about whether you are sitting correctly. The stress about your posture is probably causing more tension than the posture itself.

And if tension has built up to the point where you feel stiff, restricted, or in pain, that is worth getting looked at. When I work with people who have been carrying tension from stress, workload, or just the relentless pace of daily life, the treatment often makes a bigger difference than any postural correction ever could. Because the problem was never really about how they were sitting. It was about what their body was carrying.

I am based in Sissinghurst, just outside Cranbrook, and I work with people from across the Weald of Kent. Book a massage