42 | New Scientist | 19 February 2022Features
Are you sitting
comfortably?
If you worry that slouching is causing you long-term
discomfort, think again. It is time to rewrite the rules
of perfect posture and find the real cause of our
aches and pains, asks Alison George
H
EAD up. Shoulders back. Sit up
straight. No doubt you heard these
commands as a child, and they have
probably prompted you to sit or stand a little
straighter right now. With UK adults spending
half of the day in front of a screen, and millions
experiencing backache, you would be forgiven
for linking the two and being as concerned
about your posture as your parents.
“The public genuinely think that it’s
dangerous to slouch. We have done multiple
studies in different countries about this,”
says Kieran O’Sullivan at the University of
Limerick, Ireland, who specialises in back pain.
To a legion of slouchers, then, it may come
as a surprise to hear that clear evidence of
what constitutes good posture and whether
your deportment is harming you is only
just coming to light. The revelations are
overturning many common assumptions.
New studies are unravelling the link between
posture and pain, highlighting the problems
that we really should care about and even
identifying ways of sitting and standing that
can boost our mood. So, sit back (slouch if you
want) and prepare to have your ideas about
posture turned on their head.
The ideal posture is something that humans
have been talking about since at least the
Ancient Greeks – think of all those statues with
ANathletic-looking physiques, standing upright,
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back straight. “Written evidence in the
West begins with the Greeks, but in my fantasy,
I can see some Neanderthal mother yelling at her
kids to ‘stand up straight and stop looking like
those Homo sapiens across the valley’,”
says Sander Gilman at Emory University
in Atlanta, Georgia, the author of Stand Up
Straight! A history of posture.
What exactly is ideal though? In part, our
views of posture are guided by our culture.
“A lot of what we think of as good posture
is about aesthetics and ideas about what is
deemed elegant, attractive, interested or
motivated,” says O’Sullivan. “My research
shows that women are more critical about
their sitting posture than men, maybe
reflecting greater societal expectations of
appropriate posture among women.”
How we hold our body is also intimately
linked with ideas about health. We associate a
fit soldier as upright-looking and a physically
weak, dying person as hunched over, says Leon
Straker at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
Yet from a medical standpoint, ideal posture
is a hazy concept. Physiotherapists generally
advise that the optimal posture is a balanced
one, which is comfortable, stable and
symmetrical and doesn’t overstrain any
specific muscle or joint. But what does this
mean in practice? Should we aim to be as
straight-backed as possible, in the perfectplumb line posture that your parents probably
had in mind when they told you to sit up
straight when you were younger?
It is difficult to say. Our spine is naturally
S-shaped when viewed from the side, with a
slight inward curve in the lower back (the
lumbar region), an outward curve in the
upper trunk (the thoracic region) and another
inward curve at the neck (the cervical region).
All of us have different degrees of curvatures,
depending on our genetics, life experience
and habits. Our posture changes as we age,
too, becoming more stooped.
All of which makes it difficult for medical
experts to come to an agreement on perfect
posture. One study led by O’Sullivan, for
example, asked physiotherapists to rate the
best seated position, giving a range of nine