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moridinamael comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: David_Gerard 15 February 2013 11:17PM

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Comment author: D_Malik 19 February 2013 08:12:22AM *  1 point [-]

I've been trying to correct my posture lately. Anyone have thoughts or advice on this?

Some things:

  • Advice from reddit; if you spend lots of time hunched over books or computers, this looks useful and here are pictures of stretches.

  • You can buy posture braces for like $15-$50. I couldn't find anything useful about their efficacy in my 5 minutes of searching, other than someone credible-sounding saying that they'd weaken your posture muscles (sounds reasonable) and one should thus do stretches instead.

  • Searching a certain blog, I found this which says that sitting at a 135-degree angle is better than sitting straight, and both are better than slouching. Elsewhere on the internet, some qualified person said that standing is better than all three.

  • At the moment I'm not sure that good-looking posture is healthier, but I'd guess it's worth it anyway because of signalling benefits. My current best guess for how to improve things is to use a standing desk and to give some form of reinforcement when I notice and correct my posture. And to sit as little as possible, and not in chairs. I may incorporate stretching, but only a little and in parallel with another activity because 15 minutes a day for like 3 months is a lot of time.

I could spend more time trying to figure this out, but I suspect others here might have already done that. If so, I'd be super happy if you'd post your conclusions, even if you don't take the time to say how you came to them.

Comment author: moridinamael 19 February 2013 04:01:28PM 1 point [-]

For a period of time I was using the iPhone app Lift for habit-formation, and one of my habits was 'Good posture.' Having this statement in a place where I looked multiple times a day maintained my awareness of this goal and I ended up sitting and walking around with much better posture.

However, I stopped using Lift and my posture seems to have reverted.