What Causes Bad Posture

Injury and Muscle Guarding

After an injury, muscles can spasm as a way of protecting the vulnerable area. While muscle spasms can help keep your injuries stable and protect them from further injury, they also limit your movements and cause pain.

Prolonged muscle spasms lead to weakened muscles over time. The resulting imbalance between muscles that guard an injury and those still working normally may also lead to aberrations in body posture.

Sometimes treatment with massage and/or physical therapy can help bring muscles back to optimal functioning.

Muscle Tension and Muscle Weakness

When certain muscle groups are weak or tense, your posture can be affected. After a while, you can also develop pain.

Muscle weakness or tension can develop when you hold a prolonged position day after day or when you do routine tasks and chores in a way that places tension on your muscles or uses them unequally.

Daily Habits Can Lead to Bad Posture

As you find ways to accommodate muscle spasm, weakness, tension, and/or imbalance between muscle groups, your body can abandon good posture.

In these situations, your body may be forced to use alternate, but less efficient, patterns of muscle contraction and stretch. Called compensation, the body can still achieve its movement aim, but with compromised alignment.

Your Use of Technology and Your Posture

Your use of technology—whether you sit at a computer all day, use a tablet or cell phone, or work with several devices at once—can slowly take your body out of alignment. If you text incessantly, you may develop text neck, which is a condition in which your neck is held in too much flexion, or forward bending, for too long. This may lead to pain.

Mental Attitude and Stress May Lead to Bad Posture

Do you stress easily or have stressful relationships? If so, watch your posture!

Stress may contribute to shallow breathing or overly-contracted muscles, which may compromise your body posture. Conversely, adjusting posture can also counteract stress,

Shoe Choice and The Way You Wear Them

Clothing, especially shoes, can affect posture. Heels throw your body weight forward, which can easily catapult you into misalignment.

And if you wear down either the outside or inside of the shoes faster—because of things like weight-bearing habits—imbalanced kinetic forces will likely be translated up your ankle, knee, hip, and low back. This may lead to pain or bad posture in any of these joints, as well as your lumbar spine.

Heredity and Genetics

Sometimes it's just in the genes. For example, Scheuermann's disease is a condition in which adolescent boys develop a pronounced kyphosis in their thoracic spines. Of course, in cases such as these, it's best to work with your healthcare provider for treatment and management.