In this post, we discuss how to change your posture without having to constantly think about it.
If you’ve ever suffered with back, neck, or shoulder pain, I bet your posture has been blamed at some point.
Interestingly, posture is hardly ever suggested as a cause of ankle, knee, or hip problems.
Posture can be defined as the position and alignment of body segments in relation to each other and gravity. It comes from the Latin word ponere — “to place” or “to put.”
So how your body decides to place your bones is a simple way to describe it.
When we talk about your body in this context, what we really mean is your nervous system, specifically your brainstem and cerebellum. This is where the majority of postural adjustments are made.
This is a critical fact because neither of these areas of the brain can be considered to be under your conscious control.
Conscious v unconscious control of posture
You’ve probably had the experience of attempting to straighten your spine whilst sitting at your desk, only to discover, minutes later, you’ve returned to your original position.
Frustrating isn’t it?
We’re going to explore why that is, but let’s look at some illuminating facts first.
A 2024 Caltech study estimated that human sensory systems take in information at roughly 1 billion bits per second, while conscious thought processes information at around 10 bits per second. That’s about a 100-million-fold gap between what the nervous system is handling and what reaches our conscious awareness.
So that thought you have to sit up straight sits on top of a mountain of information processing that is truly mind blowing.
If posture is an output of all this information processing, the real question isn’t “why can’t I hold this posture,” it’s “what is my system basing its decision on, and how do I influence that.”
Here are a few of the biggest inputs:
Tissue capacity
Can your muscles produce and sustain the force an upright position demands? If not, the system will find you a cheaper option.
Perceived threat
A system that has learned a position is associated with pain will avoid that position, or brace around it, regardless of what you consciously want to do.
Load history
What you’ve asked your body to do in the hours and days beforehand shapes what it’s willing to offer you right now. Fatigued tissue reports differently to the brain than fresh tissue does.
Movement variability
A system that only ever experiences one position for long periods has no data from other positions to draw on.
None of these are fixed by a cue. All of them are influenced by exposure.
Specifically, by progressively loading the tissues involved and exploring the range of motion of your joints.
So how do you change your posture?
Have you ever left a training session and felt you were moving differently?
You somehow felt more grounded, more upright, more fluid in your movement?
This situation provides clues as to how you can influence your posture over time.
Exercise, and specifically resistance training, can improve the quality of information the nervous system receives and the capacity of tissues. Both are key factors in the decision making of your nervous system.
Once that capacity exists, something interesting happens: posture often changes on its own, without you thinking about it.
Not because you got better at remembering a cue, but because the system now has a cheaper, safer option available to it that it didn’t have before — one that happens to look different from the outside.
That’s the difference between managing an output and changing the inputs that produce it.
One requires constant effort and fades the moment you stop paying attention. The other becomes the new default, because the system chose it, not you.
Summary
We’re not in as much control of our bodies as we tend to think. Posture is certainly a good example of this.
Take comfort in this fact, and if you really want to change your posture, focus on high quality resistance training and wait for the magic to happen by itself.