Commonly patients ask if their back or neck pain is caused by their posture. This is complicated because pain can cause you to have a bad posture,also some of us were born and developed a poor shape to the spine due to the genes they inherited.But it is certainly true that most of us do not stand properly and very few of us sit well; we have lazy postures when sitting watching the television,and poor posture when we are working on the computer because the seat /desk set up is not right. And worse still, is our posture using laptop or tablets, because it is often held on the lap which means the posture has to be bad.
Simple rules are easy to say and yet hard to implement, as we have already got into the ‘bad habit’, and undoing that is not so easy.However with both sitting and standing if the head posture is good often things improve below, again you need to go through this with your Osteopath.But as a general rule when sitting if your knees are below the level of your hips, your back is thrown into the natural curve (Lordosis) that is good for it.(s0 actually, virtually all car seat do the opposite and your knees are above the level of your hips; so to counteract that they put in a lumbar support!!)
The Alexander technique revolves around good posture and is well worth a look.But the system of our body is so integrated you cannot look at one part in isolation, thus, to maintain a good posture you will need a good core. So it is very rarely as simple as ‘standing up straight’.
Osteopaths understand the integrated nature of the body and will help you put these things together in a way that works and will benefit your underlying problems.