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JayDee comments on Open thread, February 15-28, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
My own posture improved once I took up singing. My theory is that I was focused on improving my vocal technique and that changes to my posture directly impacted on this. If I stood or held myself a certain way I could sing better, and the feedback I was getting on my singing ability propagated back and resulted in improved posture. Plus, singing was a lot of fun and with this connection pointed out to me - "your entire body is the instrument when singing, look after it" - my motivation to improve my posture was higher than ever.
That is more how I got there than conclusions. Hmm. You might consider trying to find something you value for which improved posture would be a necessary component. Or something you want to do that will provide feedback about changes in your posture.
If you are like me, "I don't want to have bad posture anymore" may turn out to be insufficient motivation to get you there by itself.