Good Posture, Bad Posture
I hadn’t thought about this memory in decades yet a fleeting glance of it popped into my mind when thinking about this lecture. My parents made me attend Catholic grade school and high school—something for which I am both grateful and resentful—and I recall a time—more than one-half-century ago now—when I was in the fourth or fifth-grade of a nun angrily shoving a yardstick ruler down the back of my shirt to get me to sit up straight. I wasn’t the only victim of this very disturbed person; it was mainly the boys. This violation of my personal space and body did two things for me as I now think about it in retrospect, it made me think there was something wrong with me and it made me question authority, especially religious authority.
Truth be known, there was something wrong with me; well, as it turned out there was a LOT wrong with me as I later discovered when pursuing body-based forms of healing such as structural bodywork and experiential psychotherapy in my 20s and 30s. What I didn’t know as a child, but discovered in therapy as a young adult, was that I had what was known as a “collapsing structure.” In world of Bioenergetic and Reichian therapy, it is known as oral body structure. And it’s not a good thing, but more on that further below. This little talk deals with posture—its history, neural basis, and its relationship to the mind, personality, and behavior.
Historical Aspects of Posture
According to Ovid (43 BC–17 AD), a Roman poet, upright posture is associated with the spiritual superiority of humans versus animals who carry themselves staring at the earth. Humans, as they carry the spark of the Divine in each of their breasts, stand tall and look toward the heavens.
Poor posture has been of essential interest in medicine, dating back to the time of Hippocrates when its pattern served a diagnostic function. The ancient Greeks noted that their slaves had poor posture marked by a bent head and a slanting neck. Even Aristotle (384-322 BC) reasoned that since slaves had poor posture to begin with, they were better at tasks requiring bending and stooping. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), the father of anatomy, introduced the plumb line as a measure of posture in his De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem of 1543. This becomes the standard of human bodily perfection by the mid-eighteenth century.
Formal upright posture enters Western culture in the late sixteenth-century along with the admiration of the ramrod straight soldier posture required by the formation of organized military units and their marching, drilling, and maneuvering.
By the seventeenth-century, the belief that patterns of posture were indicative of biological patterns of different groups appears in Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1577-1640) in 1621. “Good’ posture at this time signified health, strength and beauty while “bad’ posture indicated physical aberration and moral degeneration. Lord Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), penned an influential work, Advice to His Son on Men and Manners or, A New System of Education (1781) in which one of the Earl’s standards of personal behavior condemned “odd motions, strange postures, and ungenteel carriage.” This idea would seep into the “racial science” programs of the twentieth-century (Yosifon & Stearns, 1998).
Well before Charles Darwin, some American scientists applied posture to racial analysis, arguing that Europeans alone had erect spines and straight bones allowing graceful deportment in contrast to “all the less civilized races of Men.” The concept of “race” as being the biologically determined nature of specific groups was an integral belief in science up until the mid to late twentieth-century. Irish immigrants, when they first came to America, were perceived being marked by the prevalence of knock-kneed or genu valgum. The problem of rickets was not uncommon in Ireland which is a disease that misshapes the body and was a probable cause for it. Poor posture was offered as one rationalization for slavery. Following Aristotle’s idea that people with poor posture are perfect for back-breaking labor, the slaveholders in the nineteenth-century likewise believed that the African body, being more primitive in nature, was suited for agricultural labor. A good example of this thinking is found in the New York physician, John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896), who wrote a book justifying slavery on the basis that Africans were incapable of fully upright posture. Such prejudices were reinforced by phrenological beliefs of the day—beliefs about the primitiveness of Native Americans as well—and such notions were carried on into the twentieth-century eugenics movement[1].
Posture in America
Many Americans throughout our history, specifically between the 1890s and the 1950s, have been torn by two oddly opposite models of ideal posture: the rigid straight type and the loose, relaxed type. This conflict oscillates between beliefs about what physical form constitutes good health, good character, good morality, and a good human being.
Extensive American interest appeared in comments of people such as Founding Father and President John Adams (1735-1826) after the mid-eighteenth century. A host of conduct books followed in the early nineteenth century helping the growing middle class improve itself and identify outsiders through the lens of body discipline. Here was the way of distinguishing your position between the upper and lower classes. Good posture was living proof of having a good character. Slowly, good posture came to serve as a standard for what constitutes the beautiful especially in regard to the female form. One good example is “Character as Expressed in the Body” by Susanna Cocroft published in 1906. She not only discusses how internal emotional states such as “graciousness” make the body more graceful, but she also offers a simple body reading system with which to divine a person’s character. One of her guiding rules was “Poise is Balance, is Power” (p. 28).
The rigid straight postural point of view dominated America through the Victorian age and was reflected in clothing and furniture design. Corsets, girdles, stiff vests, collars and ties all were meant to restrain and control the body and remind the wearer of straight posture. Posture and its implications for physical health was then taken up by American medicine and became a diagnostic tool as it implied a both illness and character defects.
Then posture migrated from medicine into the school system which started to believe that the classroom environment itself caused poor posture in children. Dr. D. F. Lincoln’s School and Industrial Hygiene (1880) painted posture as a grim social malady. He argued that school life was injuring children’s health, including stress and sleep problems but especially distorted posture. Again, poor posture implied a moral or psychological failure.
“A straight back may be said to be an element of beauty,” Lincoln wrote, incorporating existing aesthetic standards; “round shoulders and a twisted spine are an element of the opposite quality, beyond a doubt.”
Boys, he said, but more so girls, suffer from spinal distortion from sitting too much, little exercise, and poor posture habits when working at their desks. The solution, ironically, was better education in body usage, i.e., physical education. Physical Education enters the American scene in 1896 with the American Physical Education Review which then for the next 30 years carried at least one correct posture article. Educators in the 1910s focused on measurement of posture, detection of poor posture, and training to correct it. The American Posture League formed in 1914 as a loose confederation of posture teachers, orthopedic doctors, and mechanical engineers. It evangelized about good posture and designed products to help support it. One example of its ingenuity was to redesign the seats in rapid transit carriages.
Physical Education then takes up the torch starting with the American Physical Education Review which, for the next 30 years, had at least one pro-posture article between its covers. By the 1910s, the pro-posture community changed its tone to emphasize teaching good posture. Educators in the 1910s focused on measurement of posture, detection of poor posture, and training to correct it. The American Posture League formed in 1914 consisting of a mix of posture educators, orthopedic doctors, and mechanical engineers who preached about good posture but designed products to improve it such as better seats in streetcar carriages.
The idea that good posture supported good mental and physical health versus the idea that bad posture denigrated mood and cognitive functioning became a topic of interest for physical educators in the ‘10s and ‘20s. They then flooded the American educational system with extensive posture programs starting at the grade school level and rising all the way up to college. One prominent example of what happened at Vassar College. Posture enthusiasts there started a Posture Drive which lasted from 1919 to 1920. Students at all levels were administered “posture tests” and those who failed to conform to the ideal were categorized as “Bs” or second-class biological citizens. This practice persisted for several decades.
By the 1930s, the detection of scoliosis, rounded shoulders, or a concave chest became increasingly widespread with the old belief that posture determined personality functioning. As Florence Emily Brown Sherbon, MD (1865-1944) put it, “Posture is a definite index of well being or the reverse, but it is more than a physical index, it is also a spiritual and emotional index” (1930).
Image from https://archive.bhg.com/issue/1954/9/
Into the 1940s and through the 1950s, posture remained a hot topic. One example of mainstream concern comes from the Better Homes and Gardens Encyclopedia of 1954 repeated the standard wisdom: good posture is essential for the organs to stay in place, a sign and cause of good health; children should not be nagged but must be guided, their confidence boosted; bad posture might indicate ‘a lack of family love or other psychological issues, which of course might make it hard to correct. Posture skills must be learned in early childhood. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s class best-seller, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare, which first appeared in 1946, but remained a standard reference into the 1980s, devoted a great deal of time to the issue of posture in its earliest editions. Spock observed that a child with poor posture lacks self-confidence or has a poor social life. The line between the nineteenth-century concerns about etiquette and hygiene and mental health was crossed.
The 1960s was a period of freedom and self-discovery in which posture as a regimented standard was dropped in favor of the importance of individual differences rather than mass conformity and the Rousseau-like laissez-faire belief that children will develop good posture naturally if left alone to their own devices. It was a time for “relaxation” and “letting it all hang out” and “to go with the flow” so as to “mellow out.” The idea of the importance of good posture just withered in this climate of do what you will.
Posture as a public subject was pretty much dead by the 1960s, but it did persist in certain circles such as the use of The Alexander Technique in theater and musical performance which then was appropriate as a New Age self-development practice. The self-actualization environment rediscovered posture in the 1970s with movement therapists such as Judith Aston, a physical educator, who worked under Dr. Ida Rolf (1896-1979), the founder of Structural Integration or “Rolfing,” to physically realize her model of body balance within the gravity field. This led to her creation of Rolfing Movement Integration, and then later, Aston Patterning (Yosifon & Stearns, 1998).
The Science of Posture
Posture becomes a scientific area of study as psychology migrated from its philosophical home to its new home of experiment science in the late 1800s. Darwin’s evolutionary concepts were prominent and were used to explain human uprightness as compared to our anthropoid ancestors. Darwin believed that emotions and behaviors were also products of evolution and linked to the body in form of instincts thus linking posture with emotion. This is then taken by William James (1842-1910) as the basis of the James-Lange Theory of emotion which states that that physical experience and movements are the emotional experience (Rossberg-Gempton & Poole, 1992; see also Ellsworth, 1994). Goldthwait (1934) at Harvard demonstrated by a series of X-ray images how poor posture constricts and compresses the inner organs thus affecting healthy functioning and serving as a prelude for disease. He placed the medical stamp of approval onto the principle that good posture equals good health. He also proposed a set of principles with which to apply to postural evaluation and treatment:
- What we consider being the “normal” range of posture needs to include physical variations within the population.
- Posture can be analyzed using the plumb bob line, pelvic carriage, and pelvic angle.
- The most common types of poor posture are: (a) lumbar lordosis, (b) shop-girl’s hip (hip dysplasia), (c) flat back, (d) sway back, (e) kyphosis, and (f) poking chin.
“Poking Chin” is an outdated medical term for Chronic Forward Head Posture
From https://www.physio-pedia.com/Forward_Head_Posture#/media/File:Head_1.jpg
- Poor posture is marked by (a) muscular hypertension, (b) loss of flexibility and range of movement, and (c) loss of spinal flexibility.
- The main causes of poor posture are (a) primary (fatigue muscle pain), (b) secondary (tingling and numbness in the extremities, back strain and chronic cervical fibrositis), and (c) late secondary (osteo-arthritis of the hip and lumbar spine).
- Treatment should address five factors: (a) improvement of agility, (b) improvement of mobility, (c) re-education of muscular relaxation, (d) strengthening of weak muscles, and (e) re-education of the postural reflex (Goldthwait et al., 1934).
Unfortunately, science marches on and has marched now for almost a century Goldthwait and the 1930s and the concept of “good upright posture” and “bad slouched posture” has been thoroughly disconfirmed by research evidence. For example, a cross-sectional study of 1,108 Australian teenagers found that while forward/slumped neck postures were associated with a higher incidence of depression, they had no association with neck pain and headaches, challenging widely held beliefs about the role of posture in neck pain (Richards et al., 2016). Another study of the seated postures of Japanese fourth-graders and their academic work suggests that—although it is not confirmed yet—children who slouch while they work at a desk boost their cognitive processing ability so much so that they performed just as well on hard problems as they did on the easy ones. It is hypothesized that a more relaxed body posture frees up more available body energy for the brain to utilize (Greenwood, 2016). There is no current study of posture and organ compression from what I can tell thus far.
Closing Thoughts
Posture both defines who we are and what we will become. Posture defines the potential speed, strength, and range to move the body. Posture does affect mental and physical functioning, but only to a degree and how large that degree remains to be seen. As the old Taoist saying goes, “You’re only as old as your spine is young.”
The reality, however, is that posture—that is, posture as a healthy ideal, but an attainable one—appears in the dynamic middle ground between rigidity and flexibility. Ask any Aston Patterner.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Ellsworth, P. (1994). William James and emotion: Is a century of fame worth a century of misunderstanding? Psychological Review 101(2), p. 222-229.
Goldthwait, J., Brown, L., Swaim, L., Kuhns, J., & Kerr, W. (1934). Body Mechanics in Health and Disease. Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company.
Greenwood, V. (2016). The problem with perfect posture. Scientific American Mind 27(2), p. 15.
Richards, K., Beales, D., Smith, A., O’Sullivan, P., & Straker, L. (2016). Neck posture clusters and their association with biopsychosocial factors and neck pain in Australian adolescents. Physical Therapy 96(10), p. 1576–1587.
Rossberg-Gempton, I. & Poole, G. (1992). The relationship between body movement and affect: From historical and current perspectives. The Arts in Psychotherapy 19, p. 39-46.
Rutherford, (2022). Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.
Yosifon, D. & Stearns, P. (1998). The rise and fall of American posture. American Historical Review 103(43), p. 1057-1095.
[1] For more on the eugenics movement, see Rutherford (2022).