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bogdanb 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 posture improved significantly after I started doing climbing (specifically, indoor bouldering). This is of course a single data point, but "it stands to reason" that it should work at least for those people who come to like it.
Physical activity in general should improve posture (see Nancy's post), but as far as I can tell bouldering should be very effective at doing this:
First, because it requires you to perform a lot of varied movements in unusual equilibrium positions (basically, hanging and stretching at all sorts of angles), which few sports do (perhaps some kinds of yoga would also do that). At the beginning it's mostly the fingers and fore-arms that will get tired, but after a few sessions (depending on your starting physical condition) you'll start feeling tired in muscles you didn't know you had.
Second (and, in my case, the most important) it's really fun. I tried all sorts of activities, from just "going to the gym" to swiming and jogging (all of which would help if done regularly), but I just couldn't keep motivated. With all of those I just get bored and my mind keeps focusing on how tired I am. Since I basically get only negative reinforcement, I stop going to those activities. Some team sports I could do, because the friendly competition and banter help me having fun, but it's pretty much impossible to get a group doing them regularly. In contrast, climbing awakes the child in me, and you can do indoors bouldering by yourself (assuming you have access to a suitable gym). I always badger friends into coming with me, since it's even more fun doing it with others (you have something to focus on while you're resting between problems), but I still have fun going by myself. (There are always much more advanced climbers around, and I find it awesome rather than discouraging to watch their moves, perhaps because it's not a competition.)
In my case, after a few weeks I simply noticed that I was standing straighter without any conscious effort to do so.
Actualy, I think the main idea is not to pick a sport that's specifically better than others for posture. Just try them all until you find one you like enough to do regularly.