By Anissa Deol
For a lot of us, we can all agree that this phrase has had a huge impact on our posture. We sit up a little straighter each time we think or hear of it. Whether it be fixing our posture every twenty minutes or getting told off by our parents, our posture impacts our body more than we know.
Good posture is everything to and for your body. Sitting curved over your homework or phone, doesn’t help your body at all. It affects you long term and can actually hurt the way your body moves.
For the longest time, I had chronic shoulder pain. The ball and socket joints in my shoulder would always feel like they were about to unhinge, and I would always ache after workouts. My shoulders had given me trouble ever since I was the age of seven, and I never could figure out why. I finally got an x-ray after complaining about it so much. The doctors then took an x-ray and found, nothing.
Nothing. Nothing was the answer they gave me. And confusion was the answer I gave back to them. If it were nothing, why were my shoulders always hurting?
They said I had more forward shaped shoulders than normal people so that was probably why I was having so much pain. I accepted the fact that my shoulder shape was something I had to live with for the rest of my life. I could do exercises to help with the curvature; however, I would have weirdly forward shoulders for however long until I realized I could actually do something about it.
After a few years, the pain went away, and I thought it had been growing pains all along. However, at the start of my sophomore year in college, the pain came back and this time with a vengeance. I couldn’t do any source of exercise without them hurting during and after the workouts. I had to give up a few of my sports for a few weeks because of how bad the pain got. Eventually, I went to a physical therapist and he had a lot to say about the pain I had been having.
Some of it had been from the shape of my shoulders, but a majority of it came from the way I held myself and what I held in my shoulders. Essentially, for the past years of my life, I had been a hutched over ball with tension all over my shoulders and upper back. With that, it triggered everything from the traps in my shoulders to the pain in my shoulder blades.
Every time I had been doing, let’s say, weights and pulling them across my body, or overhead, I would use my traps over my actual muscles. I would take a majority of the weight off my body, put it into my traps, and cause even more tension down my back. That caused tight traps, sore muscles, unnecessary back and neck pain and shoulder blades that didn’t function the way they were supposed to.
Adding onto that, I was sitting hunched over my desk at school or on my phone and hadn’t even thought that was a factor. Apparently the more I sat up straight, the better my shoulders could get.
After a few weeks of keeping my posture in check and working on the exercises he had given me, I finally started to notice a difference. My shoulders no longer hurt as much, my back automatically set itself to a good posture as soon as I sat down, and I no longer kept tension in my traps. It took a while, but I finally became more aware of it. My posture led to my body solely learning from its mistakes and redoing everything but in a smarter and better way.
If I had known a majority of recovery was in the posture, I would’ve started earlier. A lot of us, being college students and constantly being busy, we forget about the smallest things in life that can help us. Even the slightest tuck in your hips when running, can make the biggest of differences for your body in the long run.
Good posture is hard to remember but try to get there before your body gets there first. You are in control of the way you hold yourself, and you want to be doing a good job of it.
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