Why poor posture and forward flexion can make your back muscles work harder, affect your balance, and change the way you move
If you’ve ever been told that you have a weak back, there’s a good chance you weren’t given the whole story.
Your back muscles may actually be working very hard.
They’re just doing the wrong job.
And there’s a big difference.
Your back muscles were designed to help hold you upright against gravity. They weren’t designed to spend eight, ten, or twelve hours a day trying to keep you from falling forward.
But that’s exactly what can happen when your head and shoulders are constantly in front of your body.
And before you blame your back, let’s talk about what you’ve been asking it to do.
Your Back Was Supposed to Keep You Upright
Think about a young sapling.
When a tree is first planted, it may need a little help getting established. Now imagine that shortly after it’s planted, a huge windstorm comes through and bends it sideways.
Someone puts ropes around the tree and stakes it into the ground so it doesn’t fall over.
Those ropes aren’t really helping the tree stand tall.
They’re preventing it from falling over.
That’s a little like what happens to your paraspinal muscles when your head and shoulders are constantly pulled forward.
Your paraspinals run along your spine and help keep you upright. Think of them as gentle suspension cables, quietly helping you maintain your position against gravity.
They’re supposed to help hold you upright.
They shouldn’t have to spend their entire day trying to keep you from tipping over.
But if you’re constantly:
- hunched over a laptop
- slumped at your desk
- folded over a steering wheel
- looking down at your phone
- leaning forward over a gaming system
- sitting with rounded shoulders
- or generally living life with your head and shoulders in front of your hips
your back muscles have a different job.
They’re fighting gravity.
They’re fighting your position.
They’re trying to keep you from falling forward.
Your back muscles were designed to keep you upright—not spend all day trying to keep you from falling forward.
And the longer you practice that position, the better your body gets at it.
Because muscles only learn what we teach them.
Unfortunately, we’re teaching a lot of them some pretty bad habits.
The Problem Isn’t That You Bend Forward
Let’s clear something up.
Your spine is supposed to move.
You should be able to bend forward to tie your shoes. You should be able to lean over to pick something up. You should be able to lean toward a friend when you’re listening to them. You should be able to reach, rotate, flex, extend, and move through all kinds of positions.
That’s normal.
That’s movement.
The problem isn’t that you flex your spine. The problem is that you rarely ask it to do anything else.
That’s a very different problem.
If most of your day is spent with your head and shoulders forward, your body starts treating that position as normal.
You sit there.
You drive there.
You work there.
You scroll there.
You play video games there.
You eat there.
And then, occasionally, you stand up and tell your body:
“Okay! Sit up straight!”
Your body is probably thinking, Excuse me? We haven’t done that in years.
What Happens to Your Back Muscles When You’re Always Folded Forward?
Your upper back, mid-back, and low back all have muscles that help support your spine and keep your body upright.
Those muscles need to be able to work in different ways.
Sometimes a muscle needs to shorten.
Sometimes it needs to lengthen while still producing tension.
That’s normal.
The problem is when we repeatedly ask it to do the same thing for hours every day.
When you’re constantly pulled forward, the muscles along the back of your body are continually being asked to control that forward position while they’re lengthened.
That’s an eccentric contraction.
You don’t need to memorize that term.
Just understand this:
A muscle can work while it is getting longer.
That’s a good thing.
But it shouldn’t be the only thing that muscle knows how to do.
If your back muscles spend most of their day controlling a forward-flexed position, they become very good at that particular job.
Meanwhile, they’re getting far less practice doing the job you actually need from them:
helping you extend, stabilize, and maintain an upright position.
So when you finally ask them to do that job, it can feel surprisingly difficult.
That’s why your back may feel weak when you try to sit or stand tall even though those muscles have been working all day.
They’re not necessarily weak.
They’re under-practiced at the job you’re asking them to do.
“But Sitting Up Straight Hurts!”
Yep.
This is one of my favorite complaints.
Someone tells me:
“I know I need to sit up straight, but when I do, it hurts.”
Or:
“I can sit up straight if I think about it, but the second I stop thinking about it, I’m right back where I started.”
Exactly.
That’s because sitting upright isn’t your habit anymore.
You can’t spend ten hours a day teaching your body one position and then expect it to happily maintain a completely different position because you remembered your posture for seventeen seconds.
Your body doesn’t work that way.
If those muscles haven’t been doing the work required to keep you upright, asking them to suddenly do it is going to feel like work.
And sometimes it hurts.
Think about what happens when you take a week off from the gym.
You may be surprised by how different you feel when you go back.
The weights feel heavier.
Your endurance isn’t quite what it was.
Things that felt easy suddenly require more effort.
You didn’t become incapable of exercising.
You stopped practicing.
The same thing happens with movement.
Except many of us haven’t taken a week off from good movement.
We’ve taken years off.
Your Body Will Always Find a Way
Here’s where this gets really interesting.
When the muscles that are supposed to help keep you upright aren’t doing their job well, your body doesn’t simply give up.
It finds another way.
Because your body has one very important rule:
It will always find a way to do what you’re asking it to do.
The problem is that the way it finds may not be the way you want it to do it.
If your back isn’t contributing enough, something else steps in.
Then something else.
Then something else.
Pretty soon, you’ve created an entire movement strategy based on compensation.
This is one reason simply telling someone to “sit up straight” isn’t enough.
You have to teach the body how to do it.
Then you have to practice it enough that the new strategy becomes familiar.
Because, once again:
Muscles only learn what we teach them.
And This Can Change Your Balance
This is also why I don’t love the idea of simply “working on balance” when someone has a balance problem.
Let’s say your upper body is consistently positioned forward.
Your center of gravity moves forward with it.
Now your body has to make adjustments somewhere else to keep you from falling.
Maybe your hips shift.
Maybe your knees lock.
Maybe your feet grip the floor.
Maybe you lean somewhere else.
Maybe you recruit muscles that weren’t supposed to be doing quite so much work.
Congratulations.
You’re balanced.
Sort of.
But you’ve created a compensation to achieve it.
I’ve seen seven-year-olds who can’t stand on one foot for more than a second or two.
Before I hand that child a balance board, I want to know something much more important:
Can that child’s body actually organize itself over one leg?
Because if it can’t, working on balance is treating the symptom.
The body will simply find another way to accomplish the task.
And if we repeatedly practice that compensation, the body gets better at it.
That’s not necessarily improving the movement problem.
It’s teaching the body to compensate more efficiently.
And over time, those compensations can contribute to movement limitations, poor mechanics, and pain.
The goal isn’t simply to make the body better at balancing badly.
The goal is to give it a better strategy.
Kids Used to Build This Without Realizing It
This is one of the reasons I created the NextGen Performance Lab.
Kids are supposed to move.
A lot.
We used to be told:
“Go outside and play. Don’t come home until the streetlights come on.”
Okay, that’s a little extreme.
But today’s children have swung almost completely to the other end of the pendulum.
Instead of climbing trees, they’re climbing virtual worlds.
Instead of playing tag, they’re playing video games.
Instead of riding bikes around the neighborhood, they’re sitting in cars being driven from one scheduled activity to another.
And nobody ever told us we were training our bodies when we did those things.
We were just playing.
But all that playing was giving our bodies thousands of opportunities to move through different positions.
We climbed.
We crawled.
We hung from things.
We ran.
We jumped.
We fell.
We got back up.
We chased each other.
We rode bikes.
We changed direction.
We reached.
We twisted.
We balanced.
We moved without anyone telling us which muscle we were supposed to be using.
We were building a movement foundation.
Today’s kids don’t necessarily get those same opportunities.
That’s not their fault.
It’s not about blaming parents.
The world changed.
But the body didn’t.
It still needs movement.
And it still needs to learn how to control itself in a variety of positions.
That’s what NextGen is designed to help develop—movement skills first, performance second.
And importantly, it can be done without putting young athletes into unnecessary situations that increase their risk of injury.
Performance Begins Long Before Strength
This matters enormously for young athletes.
A young athlete doesn’t just need strong muscles.
They need a body that knows how to use those muscles together.
Take basketball.
When a player prepares to shoot, their body needs to organize itself upright before the ball ever leaves their hands.
The spine needs to extend.
The upper and mid-back need to participate.
The shoulders need a stable foundation.
The hips and legs need to contribute.
The trunk needs to organize the movement.
And the body needs to do all of that without creating a bunch of unnecessary compensation.
If the upper, mid, and low back can’t maintain an upright position without fighting for it, that can affect everything happening above and below it.
Now look at baseball.
Throwing and hitting require even more coordination.
The body has to create extension and rotation while different parts of the body stabilize and produce force.
The same basic principle applies to tennis and golf.
The body has to create movement in one area while stabilizing another.
That’s difficult when the body has spent years practicing one primary strategy:
folding forward.
That’s why performance begins long before strength.
It begins with movement.
Your Gym Workout Can’t Undo Your Other Twelve Hours
Now let’s talk to my gym people.
Yes, you can go to the gym and do rows.
And yes, rows can strengthen the muscles of your mid-back.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is assuming that strengthening a muscle automatically teaches your body to use that muscle correctly.
It doesn’t.
If you spend most of your day folded forward and then go to the gym and do rows while your body is still organized around that forward position, you’re still practicing the same basic strategy.
You’re simply getting stronger inside that strategy.
Here’s an even easier example.
Try a military press while you’re slouched.
If your body is always organized forward, you’re likely to press those dumbbells in front of your head instead of in line with it.
You may be stronger.
But you’re still moving from the same position.
The body doesn’t care what the exercise is called.
It responds to the position, movement, and demands you give it.
You can’t simply strengthen your way out of a movement strategy you’ve spent years practicing.
That’s why someone can exercise regularly and still struggle with poor posture, back pain, or movement limitations.
The question isn’t simply:
“Are you strong?”
It’s:
“Can your body use that strength in the position and movement you actually need?”
That’s a very different question.
The Front and Back Have to Work Together
We’ve spent this entire chapter talking about what happens to the back of the body when we’re constantly folded forward.
But there’s another piece of the puzzle.
The front and back of your body have to work together to keep you upright.
If the front of your body is constantly shortened and pulling you forward, simply asking the muscles of your back to work harder isn’t going to solve the entire problem.
You can’t win a tug-of-war by making one team stronger if the other team is still pulling in the opposite direction.
That’s why doing more rows isn’t necessarily the answer.
And it’s why good posture isn’t simply about pulling your shoulders back and holding them there all day.
It’s about teaching the entire body how to work together again.
We’ll get into the front of the body next week.
Because your back isn’t the only part of your body that has adapted to all those hours over your phone, laptop, steering wheel, and gaming system.
And that brings us back to the most important lesson of this chapter:
Muscles only learn what we teach them.
If we spend years teaching them bad habits, they’re going to get really good at those bad habits.
But that doesn’t mean they’re stuck there.
They can learn something new.
It takes work.
It takes time.
It takes consistency.
And it takes repetition.
Just like building strength.
Just like improving athletic performance.
Just like changing any other physical adaptation.
The body can change when we give it a reason to.
