Does Your Posture Really Matter?

As you can see from the table, static posture is not always associated with pain and injury even after 10 years of follow up (26), which means that if you are trying to correct your or your clients’ posture, you may be wasting your time! 
More importantly, even in the cases where correlation between posture and pain/injury was found, we need to understand that such correlations mostly exist in severe cases of certain postural dysfunction such as severe thoracic hyperkyphosis and scoliosis (8,9,21). 
We should also know that correlation does NOT necessarily mean causality. For example, if we found out that more people eat shawarma at night, and car accident frequency is also higher at night, it doesn’t mean that eating shawarma at night causes more car accidents! 
Another question to consider is who existed first: the chicken or the egg? In some of the studies that found correlation between pain and posture (retrospective cohort studies or cross sectional studies), it wasn’t known whether the static posture induced pain, or the existing pain caused a change in posture as a compensatory pattern. 
These questions need to be answered before we assume that there exists a bad posture, which is an unsolved question itself (28). In the meantime, we need to realize that static posture is not as important as we once thought, unlike some claims by individuals and organizations that may be driven by commercial purposes only. 
In our next awareness article, we’re going to explore how our perception of posture may be a greater source of pain than posture itself. Stay tuned! 
REFERENCES 
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