Fixing posture for optimal athletic performance and well-being. More than stretching and rowing.

If you have bad posture, you’ll never reach your true athletic potential.

After making the transition from full-time track coach to full-time strength coach, I have began to pick up some trends that I feel many overlook when they are very focused on either how an athlete performs on the field, or the other direction, which is how much weight they are lifting in the weightroom.

What I’ve found is that athletes with poor posture will have very poor transfer of their weightroom gains to the track, pool, court, or gridiron, relative to athletes with good posture (I’ve been working with swimmers for the last few years, in addition to track athletes).

There is more than one reason for this phenomenon, but it really comes down to three things:

• Reflexive force transmission
• Underactive phasic muscles and overactive tonic muscles
• Positive mental outlook

Posture is important for athletes to be able to utilize reflexive strength and power.  If the trunk, hips and spine are in poor positions during fast athletic movements, the structure of the body won’t be able to absorb and reflect force well.

For example, when an athlete’s foot hits the ground during a sprint, and the hips are in a forward position, and the spine is curved as a result, the forces are transmitted away from the glutes, and towards the hamstrings and low back.  Not only are these muscles not meant to be the primary movers in ground strike, but they also do their job slower than the muscles closer to the center of the body. 

Contrast this with a sprint footstrike when the hips are in a neutral position, the glutes are in position to immediately punch hard, and the force is transmitted up a straighter spine, with less need for excessive muscle activity of spinal and knee stabilizers.  Putting force though properly aligned hips, and a proper spinal alignment is something nearly all athletes at the top of their game accomplish well.

Athletes aren’t doing themselves a favor in barbell activities that can exacerbate their poor postures, particularly a high training volume in lifts that put a premium on anterior pelvic tilt, when that is an issue the athlete has in their dynamic positioning and movement.  Any sort of deep squat or full-catch clean or snatch demands a good amount of pelvic tilt at those critical positions.  For athletes with relatively good dynamic posture, there is no problem using these lifts in a reasonable volume.  For those with poor posture, the focus needs to be on barbell adaptations that improve the quality of phasic muscle firing, and trunk and spine force transmission.  Single leg squats with a focus on proper firing patterns and pelvic positioning are a great remedy for these athletes.  These athletes can still perform deep squats, cleans, and the like (especially to retain the mental and biochemical aspects of barbell training), but the volume should be kept relatively low.

Finally, posture has a huge impact on an athlete’s mental outlook and psychological performance.  Since what is going on in the body has a strong effect on the mind, we know that we can take on the moods of whatever posture we happen to be in.  In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman shares with us that the simple act of forcefully smiling or frowning has a significant impact on our mood.  Try putting your head down, slouching, and frowning for 30 seconds, and tell me what you feel like.  Now stand tall, puff your chest out and smile for 30 seconds and note the difference.  Amazing, isn’t it?

A strong mind is a necessary compliment to a strong, athletic body.

So good posture will help you to maximize your athletic performance, sure, we all figured that was the case.  This isn’t an article dedicated to the weightroom, but rather, on some basic postural corrections outside of a standard barbell training regimen that can make a big difference in performance.   We’ll cover two big solutions to athletic posture here, phasic/tonic muscles, particularly those in the mid-back, and then proper breathing patterning.

Restoring Contractility in Mid-Back, Trunk, and Glutes.  A Key to Proper Posture.

The first, and primary solution to poor posture is to fix contractility and muscle tone in those phasic muscles of the body.  As was mentioned in my previous article on flexibility, “Can Stretching Really Make you a Better Athlete? The Truth Behind Static Stretching and Power Development“, muscles get tight because phasic muscles go weak.  There are some prime weakness culprits when it comes to muscles hurting the posture of an athlete.

• Gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus
• Rhomboids
• Middle and Lower Trapezius, Latissimus Dorsi
• Neck flexors, such as the Sternocliedomastoid or scalenes

It’s pretty easy to see how these muscles going weak can cause problems elsewhere.  When the glutes go weak, the lower back (a tonic muscle group) will go tight, and cause a rounding of the low back.

If the critical muscles of the middle back, such as the rhomboids, lower trapezius, and latissiumus dorsi lose tone and contractility, then the upper and lower back will respond in turn by getting tight so the head can stay upright.   If your levator scapulae is tight, don’t just spend all your time doing therapy on the muscle, but instead, start looking at what the phasic muscles of the mid-back are doing.  Of all the phasic muscles that lose tone, it is those of the mid-back that seem to have the most direct link to an athlete’s posture.

In his book “Applied Kinesiology” Robert Frost (the kinesiology practitioner, not the poet) says that when we have important postural muscles that aren’t firing properly, and we then “force” good posture, all we are doing is firing antagonists and tonic muscles even harder, rather than getting to the root of the problem, which is the contractility of the big phasic muscles.   This “over-contracting” of already tonic muscles can also make it difficult to breathe properly, which we’ll get into in just a short bit.

Check out the rest of the article here.