Define posture for me, because I think that's a really great place to start, right? Yeah. I can define bad posture as when you catch yourself in a reflection and you realize, "Wow, I'm starting to look more like a C than a not." That's so great. The question is, is that a matter of aesthetics or pain?

Well, certainly for me, it's not pain, but, you know, I notice that unless I pay attention to my posture while sitting, unless I do, you know, like bridge my fingers together and pull my chin back a few times a day, that I'm just naturally starting to tip over forward towards my text messages that aren't even in my hands right now.

And I think this is, you know, the younger generation, I mean, now that I'm 49, I can talk like that, right? I mean, it's striking. Were you born in the 1900s? They are. Late 1900s? Yeah, exactly. And I think they're starting to look like they're shaped like a C.

And I'm a big believer in people, especially men, doing neck work. I feel like if you especially- How about especially people doing neck work? Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Anytime, I'm happy to go there with this one, maybe even at the risk of being politically incorrect. Anytime I've suggested that women also do neck work, they say no.

You should see my goalie daughter because for every pound stronger your neck is, your reduction in concussion risk drops huge, a pound. Thank you. So we keep the iron neck by the door and she walks in. And we have a video in our family where she's doing her iron neck training.

She looks at me. She's like, "Dad, this is why I don't have a boyfriend." Thank you. Sorry, Caroline. But that's the way it goes, right? Because she's like, "Look at me. I look like an idiot." But she loves having a big, strong neck that can take the shot from the ball.

Yeah. Listen, I wish everyone would train their neck. I had an accident where I fell off a roof, walked away from it. My neck was sore, but I heard it and felt it. And I was like, "Oh, goodness." But it was actually from skateboarding stuff and falling and that I started training my neck years ago and realized that, wow, when I train my neck, I'm one of the few people in my age cohort that doesn't complain about shoulder pain.

Now, maybe I don't have full range of motion, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people, but anytime I see somebody with really broad shoulders where their neck is really inside of their jawline, it looks like a head was placed on the wrong action figure body, I just want to go over to them and say, "Listen, A, it's aesthetically ridiculous.

It looks like one of those flip books in the kids where you can change the head, the body, and the legs to be different animals. More seriously, it's a hazard because it's your upper spine. It's clearly not in line with the rest of your strength profile." And the other one is the more incentive-based thing is, "Hey, listen, if you train your neck, everything else gets stronger and your brain is going to be safer." And as a neuroscientist, I usually listen to the last piece.

Love it. Love it. I'm so glad we're talking about this. When I do bridges, I know that it can be risky with tongue in the roof of my mouth, I do bridges to the back, and then I do have a four-way neck machine or I use a plate. Jeff Cavalier has got a great video of how to do this that we can link to, how to do it safely.

You got to close the chain by having a hand on the ground, this kind of thing to do it safely. But I've just found that neck work also serves posture. Posture serves the ability to make eye contact when you have those things we call conversations with people in real life.

And I do think these things stack up to, we won't call it like psychological confidence, but the ability to meet somebody, like firm handshake, you're not trying to crush the other person's hand, look people in the eye, stand up straight, whatever your height. These things really matter in subtle ways or not so subtle ways.

I think that I do feel like, yes, that the younger generation and the older generation, they kind of drop out of certain elements of life. If you're looking down at the ground or your phone all the time, you can't look people in the eye. You're posturally not right, you're in pain, you're not as strong as you could be.

I mean, these things stack up to being like in an aquarium full of fish. You're becoming the fish in the background that's like, it was kind of sickly and the other fish are getting all the good stuff. If you define posture as like the Latin word root is position.

So what we're really saying is I have good position, I have bad position. One of the ways I think we've lost the narrative a little bit is we try to give people these extrinsic cues to correct their posture, shoulders back and down, check your tent. So all of a sudden you're like, well, when am I going to be a human being?

How do I practice this when I'm doing a complex skill? So the organization of your body, the organization of your spine particularly, really is a reflection of your movement habits, your behaviors, your self-identity. There's a lot of things in there, right? You didn't get the job. You won the, you got the number from Juliette.

Or you're sleep deprived even, or, and I'm going to call myself out because people are going to do it. There are many times on this podcast when I go and I look at the, because I do listen to the podcast, try and see places I can improve, et cetera.

And I'll be like, wow, my posture, I'm like hunched over. And I think to myself, and I'll go and I look- You're just reflecting my posture. No, no. And I track my sleep. So, you know, I'll go back and look and I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't sleeping as well those days or whatever it is, right?

I mean, I think that we're, we are all guilty of not paying enough attention to our posture. So what we can do is we could define posture as there is a median range of the joint positioning where we simultaneously have most access to our physiology, right? And I'll explain that a little more, but also those shapes aren't associated with increased pain risk and increased injury risk, which is real.

The research does bear that, that there are positions and shapes that lead to less effective movement and are more likely to experience pain. It's probabilistic, it's not guaranteed, there's more likely. So one of the things that I think you could understand is, hey, do you want to have access to all of the machinery?

So go ahead and slouch. Go ahead with me. And then just turn over your shoulder. How far can you turn? Yeah, not very far. Now watch this. Get into a position where you take a huge breath. Get into the biggest position where you take the biggest breath. Okay, so that's a pretty rocking shape.

Now turn your head, it goes further. So by you being cued, can you adopt a shape, an organization of your trunk that allows you to ventilate a little bit more effectively? You completely change and reorganize your structure, which led to an improvement in output. So when I'm working with people, there's only two things I really can wrap my head around.

One is, do you have normative range of motion? Yes or no? Do you have the tools we have to restore that and improve that? And does that expression give us greater biomotor output? Because those are objective measures. When biomotor output, I mean range of motion, force production, power, I see that I can express the physiology in a unique way that makes me more effective.

And that is why you'll see suddenly we have this definition that is maintaining the physiology and aspects. I'm not going to have as good shoulder flexion with my arm over my head as when I'm sitting up taller or in a position where I can take a bigger breath. And I think that's what's really great because that gets us away from good posture, bad posture into, hey, that position doesn't serve you as well in these circumstances.

And in this position, I'm working with the pararescue team in the Air Force. The number one reason they were having back injuries was getting the litter out of the helicopter because they have a litter, the soldiers there with all their gear on, they've got to lift from a totally weird flexed position, right?

And this just turns out it's not a really effective posture, position, shape that transfers to handle these higher loads. So what do we do? We work on the range of motion. We give them skills to try to organize more effectively in that shape. And lo and behold, we can reduce injury risk and injury incident in those soldiers, right?

So what we're always thinking about here is let's get away from good and bad and posture doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter at low load, low speed. And I want to be very clear about that. So you can get away with murder at low velocities and low speeds, but speed kills.

Oh, everyone's fine. But when that speed wobble starts to happen, we start to see greater likelihood of deflection from posture. Your abs don't work as effectively. You can't create the same intra-abdominal pressure, right? Check, check, check, check, check. So that's why we always are saying, hey, is this true that you're saying under high load, high speed when there's consequence?

Because maybe this set of conditions works under these conditions, but it doesn't work across all conditions. And for me, I'm trying to take the best information I have working in sports and performance and trying to transmute that to my family, transmute that to my neighborhood and to the kids I'm working with.