This post may contain affiliate links. Please read the disclaimer for more information.
Posture is another one of those things that we don’t want to address until it’s really a problem.
What posture really is, however, is a summation of habits practiced and choices made that are reflected in the way you present yourself to the world.
It is no coincidence that many desk workers tend to have a slight hunch in their back with their neck and head leaning forward. Another example would be sprinters who you may see walking on their forefeet and toes and lifting their knees high as if they were about to start running.
When I address problems in the body, this is exactly what I look at first: the person’s habits.
It’s common practice to pass things off as “The muscles are just too weak” or “I’m just not flexible” but it’s important to recognize that you got that way somehow and you can do something about it. You are not stuck in your current state forever.
Posture is a great example of this. You can effectively change the posture of any part of your body and we’re going to discuss what some of those foundational practices would look like.
First, it’s important to understand that anything and everything can play into your posture.
If you have flat feet or collapsed arches, that is affecting the rest of your body’s posture. If you were stuck in a car all day on a road trip, that can affect your upright posture when you stand up. The shoes you wear, the clothes you wear, the amount of sitting you do, the way you sleep at night; these are all things that influence your posture every single day.
It’s all about choices and habits because it didn’t just happen “overnight.”
The most obvious place, in my opinion, is to start with the shoes you wear. Why the shoes?
Whether you know it or not, your shoes are heavily influencing the way you stand, walk, and run all of the time, not even just when you’re wearing them. For someone like me who has developed one foot with a more severe collapsed arch than the other, this becomes evident.
The feet aren’t able to operate at full strength with a conventional pair of shoes because of the narrow toe box and thick, rigid sole.
When the foot doesn’t utilize all of it’s muscles or is compromised, it will start suffering in different ways. One of those things is that the arches will collapse due to weakness, leading to excessive pronation of the foot. Another example is that when ankle mobility is lacking, the feet will turn outwards to compensate and yet again, lead to excessive pronation.
In the context of posture, this matters because of what happens to the upstream musculature in the body, stemming from the feet.
An overwhelming majority of footwear on the market has an elevated heel.
This goes for men’s and women’s shoes alike and it spans across all categories of lifestyle: athletic, casual, dress, running, training, you name it. This means you’ve been wearing high heels your whole life, most likely without even realizing it.
What this means for your posture is that your center of mass is now artificially shifted forward and although it is slight, the rest of your body has to compensate for this.
In the lower body, your forefeet, calves, and knees are all overly relied-upon now because they have to constantly resist falling forward.
Arguably the most detrimental thing that happens is the hips rotate forward, aka anterior pelvic tilt. This makes your hip flexor muscles shorten and your lower back caves in as a result. Now you have overactive lower back muscles and weak abdominal muscles which is the exact opposite from what you want in your core muscles. We need strong and stable muscles in the core.
As for the rest of the back and upper body, I will resort to an excerpt from Tim Ferriss in his book, The 4-Hour Body:
“Chronic use of high-heeled shoes usually results in some degree of kyphosis-lordosis and related pains in the lower back back and mid-upper back. Kyphosis-lordosis, seen in the second illustration to the right, is posture characterized by ‘convex curvature of the thoracic spine and an inwardly curved lower back resulting from the pelvic being tilted forward.’ This is an academic way of saying hunchbacked and swaybacked at the same time.”
The illustration Ferriss is referring to is a diagram of a woman being “hunchbacked and swaybacked” because of her heeled shoes. They are forcing her spine into a more pronounced ‘S’ shape: the hips are forward and down, the low back is caved in and pushing the belly out, and the upper back and neck are pushed forward.
She now has a visual potbelly, forward head posture, and duck posture (back caved in with the butt sticking out, a recipe for back pain).
The answer to this postural debacle should be pretty obvious: the heel of the shoe must be removed. If you suffer from any of these visual symptoms or are starting to develop them, you’re going to have to address this problem sooner or later.
Tim Ferriss had to do just this to solve his problem as well. In his experience,
“The fix is simple: most of the time, wear flats or shoes with little difference in sole thickness from toe to heel. Shifting to wearing Vibram Five Fingers and Terra Plana Barefoot Vivo shoes completely erased low-back pain I’d suffered from for more than 10 years. To the degree it was possible, the Vibrams also helped restore my feet.”
I couldn’t agree more with what Ferriss has taken from the situation. Being the prolific biohacker and optimizer he is, he found the source of his pain. The back pain wasn’t a back problem, but a shoe problem.
In terms of finding shoes that do not have an elevated heel, look for shoes with the phrase ‘zero drop’ in their description. That means the heel is level with the toe. Here are some of the best options:
- Vibram Five Fingers – the shoes that Tim chose and found success with. I also wear these and can attest to their ability to help restore the feet to natural tendencies.
- Terra Plana Barefoot Vivo shoes (Vivobarefoot shoes) – I’m not sure if the name of the company was rebranded at some point but these are the shoes Tim is referring to. I also have a pair of these and love them. I wear them as indoor soccer shoes if you can believe that and they work very well.
- Xero Shoes – These are the zero-drop shoes I recommend to newbies because they are an excellent starter shoe for a more minimalistic experience. I wear several models of theirs and can safely say they don’t disappoint.
If you want to know more about Tim Ferriss or about his book, check out The 4-Hour Body.
The book is like a small dictionary of solutions to common problems. The best part is that they are anecdotal and to-the-point, so it feels relatable and gets the point across quickly without you having to dive deeper into other subjects just to understand what he’s talking about.
Leave a Reply