Why posture is often the missing piece when you feel constant tension

Take African-style scaffolding : made of carefully stacked wooden planks tied with strong rope. Imagine two of these planks are placed wrong and are sticking out : one waaaay to the right, one waaay to the left. The ropes are now super tensed trying to hold onto these planks so that they don’t fall. I can almost see the ropes’ facial expressions trying to save the whole scaffolding from collapsing: “help! Hold tight! I will save you from the cliff!”

Well, the same thing happens when some of your body parts are not being nicely stacked: some muscles end up doing more work than they’re designed for. Over time, that extra effort builds up as tension: your muscles making all kind of excruciating facial expressions, holding onto their fellow bones. How long would you be able to hold onto that plank without letting it fall?

If you experience ongoing tension in your body, it’s easy to assume something is ‘wrong’ and that you need more stretching, more strength, more effort. But often the issue is not a lack of effort. It’s how that effort is distributed.

Your body is constantly working against gravity and the way your bones are organised determines how much work your muscles need to do to support you. When your body is relatively well stacked, your structure helps you. Bones carry part of the load and muscles assist where needed: an efficient system.

But when this organisation shifts, some muscles start compensating. They work longer, harder, and more continuously than intended. Not necessarily because they’re weak, but because they’re trying to keep you upright. Over time, this leads to: fatigue, a constant sense of tension, the feeling that your body is ‘tight’ or ‘stuck’.

Interestingly, research shows that people experiencing chronic low back pain are not only in discomfort, but also less stable, with their body moving more and faster even in simple standing positions. This increased ‘sway’ (what I call the body not being stacked nicely, the article calls sway) suggests that the body is working harder, making more constant adjustments just to stay upright. The more pain that is present, the more instability is observed, and the more effort the system needs to maintain balance. 

This is not only about muscles working harder. Pain has also been shown to affect how the body senses itself in space. When this internal awareness becomes less precise, the body relies more on compensations and less efficient strategies to stay upright, which can further increase the feeling of tension. Would you look at that rippling effect?!

Hopefully you now understand why I start with posture both with my personal training clients and in my online courses. During my 1 on 1 sessions, I meet my clients where they are and we start creating small shifts through awareness, practice and consistency. This helps them the most as it affects their everyday. When their posture improves, so does their mood, their confidence, their thought patterns, the way they move and the way they strengthen. They have more energy to do what they love as they are not spending it on unnecessary postures.

From there, change becomes more sustainable, because you’re not fighting your body anymore: you’re working with it.

References:

Alshahrani A, Reddy RS and Ravi SK (2025) Chronic low back pain and postural instability: interaction effects of pain severity, age, BMI, and disability. Front. Public Health 13:1497079. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1497079