The word ‘posture’ is magic.
Look at yourself, right now. The second you read the word ‘posture’, you immediately yanked your shoulders down, thrust your hips forward and sucked your stomach in. You’re suddenly half a foot taller. You exude confidence. You look bloody fabulous.
‘Posture’ is even more magic when spoken to a roomful of people. Try it. It’s like watching a Britain’s Got Talent audition: a synchronised spine straighten, perfectly choreographed, turning the bedraggled into the beautiful.
So why the magic? Because London is painfully aware of its preposterously poor posture. Within minutes of your guilty straightening, you will have slumped back into your former shape: shoulders rounded, elbows practically at hip level, spine hunched like Quasimodo as you tap away at your keyboard. And it’s seriously damaging your health.
According to a report from the ONS, last year musculoskeletal problems (including back pain, neck and upper limb problems — all the bits directly affected by your drooping posture) resulted in 30.8 million sick days in the UK — 22.4 per cent of all absences. And a survey by Lloyds Pharmacy discovered that 52 per cent of patients using their pain management service had back pain. More pertinently, ask ‘how is your posture’ of most office workers without a yoga habit and you will hear a resounding ‘Terrible!’, announced with a hint of pride. Just as claiming constant fatigue is a point of honour for workaholic Londoners, so bad posture is evidence of hours spent shackled to a swivel chair.
So we all need fixing — spines realigned, necks unknotted and pelvises repositioned. Luckily, modern London healing is as plush as it is practical. The Connaught’s rather lovely Aman Spa offers a Signature Posture Clinic, and I’ve barely stepped through the door before osteopath John Loftus diagnoses me. I’m lopsided. My pelvis is rotated through the right: a consequence of slouching on my chair, right leg tucked under me; of twisting myself obscenely over my junk-crowded desk; of carting around a heavy tote bag on my right shoulder (I’m right-handed). As a result, I’m constantly leading with my right foot. When I stretch my hands above my head, my right fingers extend a full inch further than my left.
Before I get a complex about my weird lopsided pelvis though, it turns out that I’m not alone. Such misalignment is an ‘incredibly common source of head, neck and upper back pain’, says Loftus. Having those pains treated is useless without tapping into — his phrase — the postural source. ‘There’s no point in working on the chimney if the foundation of the house isn’t right,’ he says.
He asks me about my energy levels (poor) and sleep (same). Do I suffer from headaches? Occasionally — but surely that’s just having my eyes glued to a screen 12 hours a day? ‘It’s all tied in, you see — posturally, if the body’s not doing what it should structurally be doing, you’re wasting energy. Every movement you make, you’re forcing against your own body.’ Loftus refers to a client complaining of acute headaches — traced ultimately to her having a bunion. The limping that the bunion caused resulted in pelvic misalignment, which caused spine twisting, neck strain and, eventually, the headache.
I do not have bunions or even back pain. But I do have a painful hip that’s prevented me running for weeks. Surprise, surprise: turns out the hip pain is a result of my poor posture. Because of my lopsided pelvis, the muscles in the base of my spine have all tightened to the point that they can no longer absorb shock. On a fast 5km run last month, they finally couldn’t protect my hip any more.
Loftus stretches and releases my solar plexus on the left side of my stomach and suddenly my fingers reach the same distance again. As he gently twists my body in various vaguely yoga-ish stretches, I feel waves of release drift through me. In barely 30 minutes of pain-free repositioning, I feel… not cured, but a hell of a lot looser and balanced than a yoga-denier deserves to feel.
Every posture specialist has their own back knack, so I float through Hyde Park to The Wellness Clinic at Harrods to meet osteopath and physio, Fernando Bidino. ‘To have good posture, first you need to have a spine free from any misalignments,’ he explains. ‘If I check 100 people, 95 will have some sort of misalignment.’ To find where mine is out of whack, he runs a nervometer along my spine to find areas of heat — and thus irritation of the nerves — between the vertebrae, finally alighting on the tender L5 vertebra as the source of all my misaligned woes. Face down on
the table, he presses hard once, twice. Then, CRACK. That was unexpected. I am not a clicking kind of person. Finger cracking makes me cringe, hands over ears; hearing my spine crunch is, momentarily, horrifying. But it’s oddly freeing. I feel like I’m standing differently, maybe even straighter.
But that’s not enough. The second element of good posture is your daily activity, explains Bidino. ‘If you keep repeating one activity every day, part of your muscles get stronger and pull you to one side or the other.’ That activity isn’t just pavement pounding or other high intensity exercise — it also means sitting for hours and silently, gradually traumatising your body. Of my nine desk-bound hours each day, most feature me practically bent in two, upper chest nearly parallel with the desk as I hunch forward, one leg tucked underneath me. It’s not pretty. I look like an evolutionary reject: Homo sapiens positura horribilis. But the problem is that sitting up straight or walking tall doesn’t feel natural. My back aches sitting up straight. Bidino tells me to relax into a position that feels more natural and I flop into round-shouldered, spine-curved comfort. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Okay.’ My body is so used to its slumpedness, it’s easier to stay slumped. The only way to cure that, unfortunately, is practice.
Step forward, Upright Go: ‘biofeedback wearable technology’ that is essentially a Fitbit for posture. A security tag-like device that you discreetly stick to the skin between your shoulder blades, it connects to your iPhone via an app. Whenever you give in to the luxury of crumpling your back, the Upright vibrates, shaming you straight. Despite my sessions with Loftus and Bidino, I still find myself buzzed 14 times in 10 minutes for slouching. Dammit. Somewhat inevitably, correcting poor posture isn’t a matter of spending a few hours being manipulated and crunched at five-star spas. It takes dedication. Bidino has even trained himself posture-perfect repose: he sleeps on his side, legs slightly bent and hugging one pillow, with another between his legs and his head resting on an orthopaedic pillow. So good posture requires serious bedding investment — and an open-minded sleep partner — too.
It’s not just physical wellbeing that perfect posture promotes either. Posture is intrinsically linked with confidence. Someone walking tall is having a good day. If sitting up straight, they’re paying attention and alert. Slumping, meanwhile, literally sounds like you’re down and out. Possibly with a hump. Bidino calls this ‘emotional trauma — if someone is stressed or sad, it’s going to contract certain muscles nearby and it’s going to affect your posture, too’. Having a stressful desk job, then, is a killer combination.
For long-term help, there’s always yoga. Highbury-based instructor Lucy Morris of Yogabase points out that ‘in Iyengar yoga we pay close attention to anatomical precision and alignment. Spending time in asana — poses — and experiencing the correct alignment allows you to relearn correct posture.’ The moral of the story, as it sadly often seems to be, is that we should all do more yoga. But no matter how out of whack your posture, both Loftus and Bidino insist it’s never too late. ‘It’s like putting a jigsaw together,’ says the former. ‘Your body is designed to be in a certain position. If it moves out, then all you need to do is put everything back where it’s supposed to be.’
the-connaught.co.uk; harrods.com; uprightgo.com; lucyoga.com
