What Infants Can Teach Us About Standing Well

Have you ever lain in bed wondering when your feet will warm up? And why your knee injury is taking forever to heal? Or what you are going to do about those varicose veins? Why you feel so stiff in the morning? Or why your bunions are getting worse despite your ever-so-sensible shoes? Come to think about it, why have your back and neck decided to gang up on you? The short and sweet answer to all these woes may be in the way you are standing. 

You don’t need to stiffen inappropriate muscles to hold you in place (left) when your body aligns and balances well (right).

When students in our classes first learn healthy standing, it usually feels very contrived. Our alumni reading this post will remember feeling like they are falling flat on their face, or asking whether their knuckles are touching the floor already—it truly can be a Planet of the Apes kind of experience! 

Standing up should be tall—but not tense

The reason ordinary upright standing (rare enough I’ve given it a name, “tallstanding”) feels peculiar is because we have become accustomed to bending over backwards as part of our “upright” stance. Being truly upright and relaxed has become unfamiliar, though you did it as a child. It’s high time to course correct! The good news is this process is not only doable, but fairly rapid. 

Learning to stand

You used to tallstand when you were a child. Your feet would grab the ground and find the right places to take your weight (mostly in your heels), your knees and hip joints remained soft, you relaxed (anteverted) your pelvis, and allowed your spine, upper body, and head to stack and align above. 

Most children naturally stand with ease and relaxation. Note that my daughter’s torso is balanced upright over her legs, and her behind is behind.

While you were first discovering how to stand, as a toddler—the clue is in the name—you wobbled and often lost your balance. But before too long, you instinctively found how to organize your body upright in response to gravity.

In this video you can share the baby’s joy in his quest to stand and take his first steps.

Why is standing comfortably a problem?

Unfortunately, our body’s natural intelligence can be overwritten by damaging posture inputs. In contemporary industrial and hi-tech societies, we have poor role models, and succumb easily to passing fashions in clothes and furniture, and trends about what exercises are healthy. We also get well-intentioned but misguided advice about standing, sitting, and bending from health professionals. All of which creates the perfect posture storm. Most of us get blown off course and remodeled into distorted shapes.

 
Maintaining healthy standing posture came more naturally to earlier generations (1920s, left) who had better role models than we have today (2020s, right). Well-designed furniture, and more cause to use their inner corset muscles in daily labor, also helped. Photo (left) taken by Troy for Delineator magazine

Once you’ve departed from nature and got used to poor posture habits, standing well is no longer intuitive. Adult brains often expect to be able to simply apply new instructions to stand well, job done. But it’s not that simple. Many of the common instructions we hear are counterproductive. “Stand up straight,” for example, will result in tension that, before too long, makes us want to slouch or stretch aggressively. 

Change feels strange

When we have already spent decades setting up our soft tissues, bones, and brains, in our habitual posture, it creates strong patterning and a sense that it is “normal.” Our proprioception—that’s our sense of how we are positioned in space—tells us what we are doing is correct, regardless of the pain and damage it may inflict. 

Standing in a different, healthy stance feels strange at first. Learning standing in a second round, we can remove most of the guesswork by understanding the logic of what healthy posture looks like, and then applying tried-and-tested cues, techniques, and drills, to make it the new normal. The photographs below show Gokhale alumna Madeleine, who used to stand with her pelvis parked forward and her knees locked back (Before). This standing posture compressed her lower back and spine, and loaded weight into the delicate structures in the front of her feet rather than into the heel bones. It also hyperextended and put pressure on the knee joint, which can restrict circulation to and in the legs. 

 
Madeleine doesn't need to stiffen inappropriate muscles and joints to hold her up (left) when she aligns and balances well (right).

Whilst working through the book, before going to the Foundations course, tallstanding was one of the things which foxed me most; it seemed counterintuitive that it should be called "tall," since it involved a softening of the knees and groin, which felt like it would reduce stature. 

But I found that placing my legs directly under my pelvis, and learning to use the inner corset to lengthen and support the entire spine, and aligning my head well, all provided height. And it's certainly a much better starting point for other movements, such as hip-hinging and walking. 

Madeleine, Scotland, UK.

I think you will agree that, although Madeleine didn’t initially feel upright in tallstanding (After), visually she is beautifully aligned and naturally elegant.

Rediscover your inner toddler

The steps for tallstanding are taught in logical sequence and detail in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, and our Gokhale Exercise program. There you get to try techniques that help you let go of fixed standing patterns, and playfully explore alternatives using your balance and gravity—just as you did when you were a toddler.

Best next action steps

If you would like help finding your tall but relaxed standing position, get started by booking a consultation, online or in person, with one of our teachers. 

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