How does poor posture affect your health?
- Decreases lung capacity: poor breathing and not enough oxygen reduces nutrition to your cells, brain, muscles, and organs. Lack of nutrition to these vital parts of your body makes you feel tired and exhausted by the end of the day.
- Affects your emotions and your mood. Having rounded shoulders makes you more inward, and people might think that you want to be by yourself and are afraid to approach you.
- Imbalances in muscle strength and length: when muscles have to work constantly in stressful positions, they become weaker, and shortened. This makes it harder for your muscles to support your posture and you feel tired and achy at the end of the day.
- Creates stiff joints: since your muscles are not supporting your posture, there will be more stress on your joints and ligaments. This leads to joint stiffness and eventually degeneration of the joints.
- Results in pain from neural tension. Nerves are constantly in a stretched position, and might be impinged due to muscle tightness and narrowing spaces.
- Generates tissue inflammation: tissues are more stressed and overused and react with swelling and redness in the tissues. That in turn will increase your pain and decrease your function.
- Makes you inactive: your muscles are getting tight and weak, pain creeps in, you gain weight because you would rather take the car to the corner store than walk, or the elevator instead of walking up the stairs because it hurts and you are fatigued, and ultimately you will be a couch potato.
Thank you to Bettina Neuman at Rising Sun Physical Therapy for this list.