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When I was a teenager, my mom was always trying to get me to stand up straight. “Stop
slouching! You’re so round-shouldered! Pull your shoulders back!”
Sound familiar? Poor Mom—she couldn’t get me to straighten up no matter what she said.
Neither of us realized it, but I didn’t have the physical strength to do so. I was a
bookish kid who had always gone for good grades rather than athletics, so I had no muscles.
I’d pull myself upright for a couple of minutes, but as soon as I stopped thinking about
it, I’d gradually sag into my usual position again, head down, shoulders rolled forward.
And there I’d stay until the next time Mom said something.
Of course, we didn’t realize it was a question of strength. We both figured it was my
attitude. I slouched because I was a teenager, and was thus required by unwritten law to slump
around with my eyes down all the time. Plus I was gawky and self-conscious, so I tried to
ignore my body and live in my head as much as possible. Poor posture was a way of staying
disconnected; it drew less of my own attention to my body than standing up straight. Over the
years, I succeeded in eliminating any mind-body connection with my upper body at all. Even when
I took up jogging to lose weight, my arms and shoulders just kind of hung there inertly.
Some 12 years later, the first aerobics craze hit (remember all those high-impact classes,
where we’d do 50 jumping jacks, all of the gals and some of the guys wearing leotards,
shiny tights and leg warmers?). Okay, fashion-wise the memory is a bit embarrassing, but when I
took my first aerobics classes, I discovered that there was a kind of exercise that I really
enjoyed. For once I didn’t have to force myself to work out—I actually looked forward
to it. And once I started to enjoy exercising, I gradually, imperceptibly became more
comfortable in my own body. It wasn’t that I thought I looked better; it was just that my
body was a happier place to live in, because it was suddenly a source of feelings of well-being
rather than of awkwardness and self-consciousness. I still had body-image issues—some of
which will never go away. But for the first time in my life, I really felt great. I had a sense
of physical health I’d never had before.
In addition, aerobics used my whole body more than jogging or any of the other activities
I’d forced myself to do before. We did lots of choreography—actual combinations of
arm and leg movements. It was the closest thing to dancing I’d ever done. And very much to
my surprise, I was pretty good at it. I could pick up the moves fairly easily. I liked using my
arms to do presses or punches to accompany all those jumping jacks and lunges. And my body
stopped being just an inconvenience that I wished would go away. I could feel my arms working,
my shoulders, my chest and upper back muscles. That long-lost mind-body connection started to
return.
Out of all this came a side effect I hadn’t looked for. One day when my Mom was visiting,
she said, out of the blue, “You have such great posture!”
“Me?” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding. You were always telling me how bad it was!”
“Really? Well, there’s nothing bad about it now.”
I really didn’t know what to make of this. I was tempted to write it off as motherly
idealism. But several months later someone else complimented me on my posture. And in fact,
it still happens every now and then. Of all the things I expected to become when I grew up,
none of them was Posture Queen. In retrospect it’s obvious what happened. Thanks to all the
exercise, my own muscles were strong enough to pull me up into a straighter posture and hold me
there. As my upper back strength increased, my shoulders rolled back and my head came up. I stopped
slouching around like Igor in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. There was an emotional component to all
this, too: I had stopped trying to reject my own body and become allied with it instead. As a result,
I naturally held my head up higher instead of trying to make myself disappear.
And the best part is that all this was a total freebie. I hadn’t been trying to improve my
posture at all. Sure, I was trying to get fit, lose weight, and have fun, but I never thought
better posture would be an added benefit. So I feel like I got something for nothing.
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