The best reason to change your posture is that you can. It is as simple as that.
I have been teaching people to walk for quite a while, and I am still amazed by how few people think about how they stand and walk.
I stand, therefore I know how to stand.
If only it were that simple.
I stand, therefore I stand and will likely degenerate in my spine if I manage to make it through a good number of decades.
That’s more like it.
We all reach adulthood with posture and movement patterns that are an amalgam of so many different influences— imitating parents and siblings; injuries and accidents; genetics; exercise or lack thereof.
We are the sum total of so many things but we aren’t aware of many of them.
The thing about unconscious patterns is that to change them you have to become aware of them and we are sort of hard-wired not to be aware.
Making changes to patterns a lifetime in the making requires an action plan heavy on repetition which is the main ingredient for facilitating the ability to change your posture.
But it also necessitates a willingness to change and that willingness, for many reasons, is not easy to come by.
There is one thing that the brain has devised that might be able to stir up some impetus to life-altering action, and that is pain.
Pain is the thing that sends most people my way. In truth, it would be much smarter to change your posture before there is a painful need for it to happen, but that is probably too much to expect.
I understand that, particularly considering that pain is exactly what it took for me to change my posture and the way I walk.
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