![]() So how do you fix back pain through posture? But the good news? With a bit of conscious effort, you can change this (and look and feel better as a result). So, the bad news is, most of us have bad posture-and that can have seriously negative effects on our health. “Over time, poor posture may cause chronic shortening of certain muscle groups and may even contribute to certain aches and pains down the road-poor posture may even cause the early onset of osteoarthritis or degenerative disc disease.” “The way you hold your neck determines how much pressure is placed on your spine, and for every inch you lean your head forward, 10 pounds of added pressure is placed on your spine,” Koser says. And your neck may get tight, resulting in musculoskeletal strain or even injuries to the intervertebral discs.” If your back is not supported with a strong core, when you move, you may injure your back. For example, if your shoulders start to round forward, when you go to reach overhead, you may develop shoulder impingement. “Then, you may become susceptible to a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. “Short term, you’ll develop muscle tightness, which can lead to a restricted range of motion in your joints,” says Ellen Bunn, PT, DPT. “Sedentary behaviors such as prolonged sitting without standing breaks or constantly looking down at a cell phone screen can be very detrimental,” Koser says. Because we spend the majority of our day sitting and staring at our computer or phone (the average American spends a whopping 10 hours per day staring at a screen), bad posture is pretty much a universal experience. I may have been horrified when I saw that photo of myself, but I’m hardly the only one struggling with posture issues. I don’t want to look slouchy forever-or experience the pain that goes along with said slouching-so I talked with the experts to figure out how to straighten up and get my posture in line (pun intended!) once and for all: Bad posture: Pretty much everyone’s got it. “Besides improving your overall self-image and confidence, proper posture also helps develop stronger core muscles and prevents muscle fatigue.” “Good posture is one of the most important controllable factors in optimizing spine health and preventing possible conditions from forming,” says Robert Koser, D.C., of the Laser Spine Institute. A few hours into every workday, I find myself dealing with pain in my back, neck, and shoulders-and when I try to straighten up, it’s like my muscles don’t want to cooperate. ![]() Honestly, my posture was painful to look at-and it’s painful to experience too. ![]() My back looked oddly rounded, and even though I’m terrible at estimating how tall people are, even I could tell that the way I was standing made me look several inches shorter than my real height of 5’6″. My neck and shoulders were hunched forward, and my face was hovering inches over my phone. When the photo was taken, I must have been checking my email or responding to a text. ![]() But it wasn’t their gorgeous faces or the insane amount of food in the photo that caught my eye-it was myself in the background. I was recently looking at photos from my best friend’s bachelorette party in New Orleans and came across a picture of my best friend and her sister posing at our crawfish boil ( yum).
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