Most of us have been corrected about our posture at some point.
“Sit up straight.”
“Pull your shoulders back.”
“Stop slouching.”
You make the adjustment, perhaps feel rather pleased with yourself for remembering, and then thirty seconds later your attention moves to something else and your body returns to where it was before.
For years, we’ve tended to treat this as a discipline problem: if only we remembered to hold ourselves properly, our posture would improve.
I think there’s a much more useful way to look at it.
Posture isn’t a position you are supposed to hold all day. It’s something your brain and body are continually creating in response to what you are doing, where you are and how secure you feel there.
In other words, your posture is less about remembering to straighten yourself up and more about how effectively your whole system is organising you against gravity.
And once you understand that, posture becomes much more interesting.
Your brain is constantly working out where you are
To keep you upright, your nervous system needs a remarkably detailed picture of where your body is in relation to the world around you.
Your eyes contribute information about your surroundings and where you are within them. Your vestibular system, located in the inner ear, helps detect head movement and your relationship to gravity. Meanwhile, receptors throughout your muscles, joints and skin provide information about position, pressure and movement, including what is happening underneath your feet.
You don’t consciously process any of this while you are walking into the kitchen or standing talking to someone. Your brain is doing it automatically, continually updating its best estimate of where you are and what your body needs to do next.
Posture emerges from that process.
That is one reason I find the traditional idea of ‘good posture’ rather limiting. Your body isn’t supposed to remain fixed in one theoretically perfect position. It needs to be able to adapt - to sitting, standing, walking, reaching, turning, carrying and all the other things we ask it to do during an ordinary day.
A useful body is not a body that holds itself rigidly upright. It is one that can organise itself well and change position easily.
Sometimes what looks like ‘bad posture’ is an adaptation
This is where things become particularly relevant as we move through our forties, fifties and beyond.
Bodies acquire history.
Perhaps you injured an ankle several years ago and unconsciously started relying more on the other leg. Perhaps one hip became painful and you learned to avoid loading it fully. You may have spent years working at a desk, experienced a period of back pain or simply stopped moving in as many different ways as you once did.
The nervous system adapts to all of this.
You might stand more heavily on one leg, hold one shoulder slightly higher, stiffen through your neck or become more rigid through your trunk. None of those patterns necessarily means there is a “bad” muscle that needs correcting. They may be strategies your system has learned because, at some point, they made movement feel safer or more predictable.
That distinction matters because it changes how we respond.
Instead of looking in the mirror and thinking, I must remember to pull that shoulder back, we can become curious about why the body might be organising itself that way in the first place.
Why stretching the tight bit isn't always enough
This also helps explain something many people find frustrating.
You stretch the tight area. It feels wonderful. An hour later, the tension is back.
Or perhaps you have been told that certain muscles are weak, so you diligently strengthen them, yet the way you stand or move barely changes.
Neither stretching nor strengthening is pointless - far from it. Mobility and strength both matter enormously, particularly as we get older, but the body doesn't organise movement according to muscle strength alone.
If your nervous system has become accustomed to a particular strategy, changing one muscle doesn't necessarily give it enough reason to choose another.
This is where my own approach to Pilates and strength training has become increasingly influenced by what we understand about the brain and nervous system.
Alongside asking, Where do we need more strength? or Where do we need more movement?, I’m interested in another question:
What information might help this person move differently?
Sometimes that means working on balance. Sometimes it is changing where the eyes are looking or moving the head while the body stays controlled. It might mean giving much more attention to what is happening through the feet, varying a familiar movement or simply slowing something down enough for the person to sense it properly.
These are small changes, but they can give the nervous system something new to work with.
Strength still matters and possibly more than we realise
There is an important point here because I don’t want ‘brain-based’ movement to become another reason to avoid strength training.
A capable nervous system still needs a capable body.
Strength gives us options.
If your legs are strong enough to control you as you step down from a kerb, your brain has more options available than if they are struggling with the load. If your hips and trunk can manage the weight of a suitcase, you are less likely to need elaborate compensations to move it. If you have maintained strength through your upper body, reaching, pushing and carrying remain ordinary parts of life rather than tasks requiring careful preparation.
This is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in combining Pilates and strength training rather than treating them as competing disciplines.
Pilates can develop awareness, control, coordination and movement variety. Progressive strength training develops the physical capacity to deal with greater loads. A neuro-informed approach adds another dimension by considering the quality of information the nervous system is receiving and how confidently the body is organising itself in response.
Together, they give us something much more useful than a theoretically perfect posture: a body with choices.
I see this in clients all the time
Some of the most interesting changes clients describe aren't things I could photograph for a before-and-after comparison.
They tell me they feel more upright when they walk.
They realise they are no longer holding onto something every time they move from one position to another.
They notice that one side of their body, which has felt less reliable since an operation or injury, is beginning to participate more naturally.
Or they finish a slower, more considered Pilates session and tell me that walking afterwards simply feels easier.
Posture after 50 isn't a project to complete
I think this matters particularly in midlife because it is very easy to interpret normal changes in the body as evidence of inevitable decline.
You notice your shoulders becoming rounder in photographs, your balance feels slightly different or you find yourself stiffer after sitting, and suddenly posture becomes another thing you feel you should be “working on”.
I would rather we saw those changes as useful information.
Perhaps your body needs more strength than it did ten years ago. Perhaps it needs greater movement variety. Perhaps your balance system would benefit from being challenged rather than protected. Perhaps you have become very good at moving in a small number of familiar ways and your nervous system simply needs some new experiences.
And perhaps you also need more recovery. An exhausted nervous system doesn't necessarily respond well to being given more and more things to correct.
This is where self-care becomes much more practical than the phrase sometimes suggests. Looking after your body can mean building strength consistently, moving regularly, challenging your balance, allowing time for recovery and staying curious about what changes from one day to the next.
None of it needs to be dramatic.
What matters is consistency.
The brain learns through repetition and experience, just as muscles and bones respond to regular loading. A single brilliant session cannot compensate for weeks of doing very little, but small, appropriate challenges repeated over time can change a great deal.
So should you stop thinking about posture altogether?
Not quite.
Posture can tell us something useful about how the body is organising itself, but it doesn't need to become another standard against which we judge ourselves.
The next time you notice yourself slumping, leaning to one side or holding tension around your shoulders, rather than immediately pulling yourself into a “better” position, become curious.
Have you been sitting for too long?
Are you tired?
Do you feel equally comfortable standing on both legs?
Have you moved your spine, head and shoulders in different directions today?
Are you strong enough for the things you regularly ask your body to do?
Would movement help more than another correction?
These questions lead somewhere useful because they treat posture as part of a living, adaptable system rather than a pose.
Your brain and body are continually learning from one another. Give them better information, enough strength, regular movement and the opportunity to practise, and the way you hold yourself may begin to change without you spending the rest of your life reminding yourself to “sit up straight”.
And, for me, that is the more interesting goal: not perfect posture, but a body that feels adaptable, capable and increasingly trustworthy.