• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Breaking Muscle

Breaking Muscle

Breaking Muscle

  • Fitness
  • Workouts
    • Best Shoulder Workouts
    • Best Chest Workouts
    • Best Leg Workouts
    • Best Leg Exercises
    • Best Biceps Exercises
    • Best Kettlebell Exercises
    • Best Back Workouts
    • Best HIIT Workouts
    • Best Triceps Exercises
    • Best Arm Workouts
  • Reviews
    • Supplements
      • Best Pre-Workout
      • Best BCAAs
      • Best Testosterone Boosters
      • Best Bodybuilding Supplements
      • Best Creatine
      • Best Supplements for Weight Loss
      • Best Multivitamins
      • Best Collagen Supplement
      • Best Probiotic
      • Best Non-Stim Pre-Workout
      • Best Greens Powder
      • Best Magnesium Supplements
    • Protein
      • Best Protein Powder
      • Best Whey Protein
      • Best Protein Powders for Muscle Gain
      • Best Tasting Protein Powder
      • Best Vegan Protein
      • Best Mass Gainer
      • Best Protein Shakes
      • Best Organic Protein Powder
      • Best Pea Protein Powder
      • Best Protein Bars
    • Strength Equipment
      • Best Home Gym Equipment
      • Best Squat Racks
      • Best Barbells
      • Best Weightlifting Belts
      • Best Weight Benches
      • Best Functional Trainers
      • Best Dumbbells
      • Best Adjustable Dumbbells
      • Best Kettlebells
      • Best Resistance Bands
      • Best Trap Bars
    • Cardio Equipment
      • Best Cardio Machines
      • Best Rowing Machines
      • Best Treadmills
      • Best Weighted Vests
      • Concept2 RowErg Review
      • Hydrow Wave Review
      • Best Jump Ropes
  • News
  • Exercise Guides
    • Legs
      • Back Squat
      • Bulgarian Split Squat
      • Goblet Squat
      • Zercher Squat
      • Standing Calf Raise
      • Hack Squat
    • Chest
      • Bench Press
      • Dumbbell Bench Press
      • Close-Grip Bench Press
      • Incline Bench Press
    • Shoulders
      • Overhead Dumbbell Press
      • Lateral Raise
    • Arms
      • Chin-Up
      • Weighted Pull-Up
      • Triceps Pushdown
    • Back
      • Deadlift
      • Trap Bar Deadlift
      • Lat Pulldown
      • Inverted Row
      • Bent-Over Barbell Row
      • Single-Arm Dumbbell Row
      • Pendlay Row
Fitness

Does Good Posture Matter, or Is It All a Load of Crap?

We talk a lot about the importance of posture in the strength world, but what does "good posture" really mean?

Robert Camacho

Written by Robert Camacho Last updated on Nov 22, 2021

If you’ve been in the fitness world for any length of time, you’ve probably heard people talk about posture. While a large number of coaches, athletes, and even licensed medical professionals believe it plays an important role in our daily function, there is no genuine scientific consensus about it.

In fact, a quick Google search will show you that not only is there no consensus, but there is a number of people vehemently opposed to the idea that posture matters. I’m going to look at the logic underlying both viewpoints and try to elucidate on how, when, and why posture matters.

What Is Posture?

In order to understand the arguments, we need to define our terms as people frequently use the same words to say different things. It’s been my experience that the topic of posture is one where this happens quite a bit.

Posture is just a position. “Posture,” as it’s defined in common usage, is some kind of idealized foundational position. I’ve seen a handful of articles talking about teaching or reaching something called “perfect posture.” Perfect posture is just like perfect exercise technique. There are certainly universal guidelines that can be applied to everyone, but the idea that all seven billion of us will have the exact same baseline alignment is silly. There’s no single, universal perfect posture, in the same way there’s no single, universal perfect technique for every exercise. It has to depend on the person.

Some of the confusion about perfect posture arises in a similar way as the confusion about perfect technique. People hear certain cues: “Shoulders down and back,” “Core tight,” “Tilt your pelvis,” etc. and they internalize those cues as ironclad rules. “Knees out” is a useful cue for some squatters. The same way “tuck your elbows” is useful for some people while benching. But that is far removed from saying every single person needs to push their knees out further and tuck their elbows harder. Cues are context based, technique is context based, and posture is also inevitably context based.

“All I’m going to say is this: there’s also quadriplegics out there. I guess I should just give up on using my limbs since they can’t, right?“

Is There an Ideal Posture?

Despite the lack of universal norms, I think we can all agree that for each individual there is a technical, mechanical ideal we’d like to see in specific movements. The same can be said for posture. Posture is basically your body’s neutral zone. It’s the position of alignment where the most skeletal muscles are at a resting, neutral length. This is important for a couple of reasons.

Tightness

Usually when people feel tight, it’s some combination of physical muscle length and neurological input. That neurological input can be the result of a lot of things, but most of the time it’s based on habitual positions and your body’s response to those positions.

If you habitually sit and stand with an anterior pelvic tilt, you’re lengthening your hamstrings, which could make them feel tight. If that wasn’t enough, you may also be triggering a protective mechanism that causes the muscle to stay slightly contracted to prevent any further and potentially damaging lengthening. Habitually adopting a position of neutrality will go a long way toward preventing the neurological inputs that lead to this type of “tightness.”

Alignment Is Leverage

Your body is a complex system of levers. It’s just basic physics that for each lever there are optimal angles and positions for creating ideal leverage. In the human body, most of these positions are related to postural neutrality. I say “most” because there are some positions you can use to increase your leverage that aren’t neutral – but you’re also probably sacrificing structural integrity and tissue health to do so. Risk/reward.

“[T]o my knowledge there are no quality studies that have effectively demonstrated any correlation between posture and pain or dysfunction.”

Joint Position Is Muscle Activation

The overall activation of skeletal muscle is more or less based on three things:

  1. Physical innervation
  2. Nervous system control
  3. Joint position

Different joint positions can significantly affect your ability to maximally contract a particular muscle or group. Ideal activation of numerous muscles occurs from slight variations on neutral posture. So, once again, neutral is the best universal starting point to achieve optimal muscle activation.

Finding Your Neutral Position

Finding your neutral and learning how to use it will help you reduce feelings of tightness thereby improving flexibility and mobility, in addition to giving you optimized leverage and muscle activation. Seems like kind of a no-brainer, right? So then why would anyone say it doesn’t matter? Well, the science just isn’t there yet.

Thousands of clinicians can vouch for the efficacy of postural interventions when used on the right patients, but to my knowledge there are no quality studies that have effectively demonstrated any correlation between posture and pain or dysfunction. While this may seem absurd given the things I’ve said about posture, there is one glaring issue. All of the studies that have been brought to my attention concerning posture look at it in a vacuum. They find people with pain and just look at their posture or they find people with bad posture and ask them about their pain.

What Is Movement

What is movement? If you had to define movement, what would you say? Bonus points if you can do it without using the word “move.” For me, the best definition I’ve come up with is that movement is the aggregation of multiple positions into a functional output. Movement at its heart is just a slideshow of positions.

“Your body is a complex system of levers. It’s just basic physics that for each lever there are optimal angles and positions for creating ideal leverage.“

Posture, then, is just one of those positions. Pain and injury tend to occur during the transitions, going from one position to the next. Injuries also tend to be caused by fatigue or excessive load of some kind. The combination of these facts is that a single position, by itself, doesn’t mean much.

You can have terrible posture and positions, but if you never use them to do anything particularly challenging, then there’s a good chance you’ll never experience any issues. In fact, if you have terrible resting posture, but whenever you go to perform an athletic movement you magically default to ideal alignment and position, then your resting posture doesn’t matter.

Of course, due to the nature of movement as a behavior and the process of habituation, it’s incredibly unlikely that would happen. Our bodies adapt to the way we move. You certainly don’t need good posture to be strong and healthy, but you also don’t need to be strong and healthy. It’s not really about that.

Inevitably when discussing posture someone always feels obligated to point out that some people have severe structural issues, genetic or otherwise, that prevent them from ever obtaining neutral posture. They then use this to make the leap that all attempts at postural training are pointless. All I’m going to say is this: there’s also quadriplegics out there. I guess I should just give up on using my limbs since they can’t, right?

Continuing the Posture Debate

In closing, posture is incredibly important. What we still need clarity on is exactly how and when. Hopefully this article has helped shed some light on the discussion for you. I’m looking forward to see what the literature comes up with in the future.

Check out these related articles:

  • How to Unlock Your Athletic Potential Through Good Posture
  • How I Banished Chronic Hip Pain Through Posture Alignment Therapy
  • Why Slouching Isn’t the Only Bad Posture
  • What’s New On Breaking Muscle Today?

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photos 3 courtesy of CrossFit Empirical.

Photos 2 and 4 courtesy of Shannon Khoury.

Robert Camacho

About Robert Camacho

Robert was something of an odd child. Not particularly athletically gifted, he instead spent most of his time reading comics and watching martial arts movies. Slowly but surely, the steady diet of incredible (if fictitious) physical specimens instilled in him a desire to begin training of some sort. Fueled by hours of awesome but highly questionable action movie workout montages mixed with some subconscious desire to become Batman, Robert found himself desperate for any information that would help him along his road to becoming bigger, stronger and faster.

This life-long interest led Robert to pursuing a degree in exercise science and a career in the fitness industry. It also, rather unfortunately, left him plagued with a variety of debilitating injuries. While doing pistols on an upside-down Bosu and clapping pull ups was impressive, he believes it was precisely that type of flashy, dangerous training coupled with participation in combat sports that left him with torn labrums in his right shoulder and left hip and a torn ligament in his foot. He also managed to acquire tendonitis in just about every joint with tendons (read: all of them).

Disillusioned by his stint as a trainer in a corporate gym and frustrated by the injuries that kept him from training, Robert began working at a sports physical therapy clinic, helping design and implement late-stage return to sport training protocols for athletes who had completed their post-surgical rehab. Rabidly absorbing all information available to him through this new experience and constantly harassing all of his fellow clinicians with questions, Robert gained a unique insight and understanding into both the human body and his own personal struggles with injury. Constantly seeking to improve his understanding of diagnosing and treating movement disorders, Robert has spent the last five years assisting athletes of all levels, from children to the professionals, in returning to their sport pain free and stronger than ever.

When he’s not reading, writing, or ranting on his blog, Robert splits his time between his role at SportsCare Physical Therapy in Paramus, New Jersey, trying to deadlift 500lbs, and as a student chasing his own Doctor of Physical Therapy.

View All Articles

Related Posts

Fergus Crawley 5K Run Tips Photo
Fergus Crawley Shares 5 Tips For Running a Better 5K
Actor Chris Hemsworth in gym performing dumbbell row
Chris Hemsworth Diagrams a Killer Upper Body Workout Fit For an Action Star
Hugh Jackman Deadpool 3 Workouts Spring:Winter 2023
Hugh Jackman Returns to Wolverine Condition in Workouts for “Deadpool 3”
Method Man Incline Dumbbell Presses December 2022
Check Out Rapper Method Man Cruising Through 120-Pound Incline Dumbbell Presses for 10 Reps

Primary Sidebar

Latest Articles

New Year’s Fitness Sales (2025)

XWERKS Motion BCAA Review (2025): A Registered Dietitian’s Honest Thoughts

Assault Fitness AssaultBike Pro X Review (2025): Assault’s Best Bike Yet?

13 Best Exercise Bikes for Home Gyms (2025)

Transparent Labs BCAA Glutamine Review (2025): The Key to Post-Workout Recovery?

Latest Reviews

Element 26 Hybrid Leather Weightlifting Belt

Element 26 Hybrid Leather Weightlifting Belt Review (2025)

Omre NMN + Resveratrol, Lifeforce Peak NMN, and partiQlar NMN on a red background

Best NMN Supplement: Fountain of Youth in a Bottle? (2025)

The Titan Series Adjustable Bench on a red background

Titan Series Adjustable Bench Review (2025)

A photo of the NordicTrack Select-a-Weight Dumbbells on a red background

NordicTrack Adjustable Dumbbell Review (2025): Are These Value Dumbbells Worth It?

woman lifting barbell

Be the smartest person in your gym

The Breaking Muscle newsletter is everything you need to know about strength in a 3 minute read.

I WANT IN!

Breaking Muscle is the fitness world’s preeminent destination for timely, high-quality information on exercise, fitness, health, and nutrition. Our audience encompasses the entire spectrum of the fitness community: consumers, aficionados, fitness professionals, and business owners. We seek to inform, educate and advocate for this community.

  • Reviews
  • Healthy Eating
  • Workouts
  • Fitness
  • News

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS Feed

© 2025 · Breaking Muscle · Terms of Use · Privacy Policy · Affiliate Disclaimer · Accessibility · About