r/Posture

I've recently been practicing diaphragm breathing (breathing through stomach + expanding ribs, in with nose out with mouth) while laying down to correct my anterior pelvic tilt since I found that helps to correct it online; however, I’m confused as to how 3 minutes of diaphragm breathing helps correct anterior pelvic tilt if for the rest of the day I’m just breathing through my nose normally without thinking. Would just those 3 minutes a day (paired with strength + stretching) really make a difference to fix my APT?

Hey, I'm 17 M and skinny fat. Aside from that, I've learnt that I've an anterior pelvic tilt and very weak knees, as well as almost no back muscles.

I've been researching a bit, and came to the conclusion that I must stretch my hips to get a better posture, as well as build more muscles in the back.

The issue right now is I'm not being able to stretch that well, and it could be both a knee problem and glute problem. My knees creak and pop when doing anything really and my glutes are very very weak, therefore I'm not being able to stretch as I should be.

FYI I've a slight scoliosis that's fixable with proper posture and back muscles.

So my question is, should I focus on strengthening my glutes and knees first, then go on to stretching and lastly back muscles, or what should I really do?

Any other suggestions and tips are welcome thanks.

I dont know what breathing exercise I need to program in my routine since there so many I found from Conor Harris and other content creators from that niche. I am already doing strenght training at gym but I want to make at home routine for fixing my posture problems but its complicated since its so many drills that I could do but dont wanna spend so much time doing them.

My daughter is four months old and my body is completely different than it was before. I expected the obvious stuff but my posture is completely falling apart.

I think it's a combination of nine months carrying weight out front then months of hunching over to breastfeed then carrying a baby on one hip constantly. My upper back is rounded in a way it never was before and my neck is always tight.

I've started doing some gentle strengthening work but progress is slow. I'm also just exhausted all the time as you can imagine so I don’t have the energy or the time to exercise more.

Has anyone navigated postpartum posture issues? Did anything help? I'm open to anything that doesn't require a lot of active effort because I have approximately zero of that left.

Thanks, one very tired mom

"Sit up straight" / "shoulders back" never worked for me long-term — I'd hold it for ten minutes through sheer effort and then collapse. What actually helped were a handful of alignment cues from Tai Chi, which is obsessive about the spine because you can't move efficiently from a collapsed or braced frame. None of these require doing Tai Chi; they're just good standing/sitting cues:

1. "Suspended headtop" (xu ling ding jin). Imagine a thread attached to the crown of your head — not the forehead, the very top — gently lifting you toward the ceiling. The spine lengthens upward from the top rather than you cranking your chest up from below. This single image reorganizes the whole stack with almost no effort, which is the point: good posture should be near-effortless, not held by force.
2. Drop the tailbone / unclench the lower back. Most "stand up straight" attempts overarch the lower back (butt sticking out, ribs flaring). Tai Chi cues a slight relaxing/lengthening of the tailbone downward so the lower back isn't cranked. Think "long spine," not "arched spine."
3. Let the shoulders hang, don't pull them back. "Shoulders back" creates tension. The cue instead is to let the shoulders relax down and slightly forward-rounded into their natural hang, with the upper back wide. Relaxed-wide beats forced-back.
4. Soft knees, weight in the whole foot. Locked knees tilt the whole chain. Micro-bend the knees and feel your weight spread across the whole foot (heel, ball, outer edge), not jammed into the heels or rolled onto the arches.

The theme across all of them: good posture in this system is about removing the tensions and collapses that pull you out of alignment, then letting the skeleton stack up with minimal muscular effort — rather than muscling yourself into a "correct" shape you have to maintain. The effortless version is the only one that lasts.

Curious if the "suspended thread from the crown" image works for others — it's the one cue I wish someone had given me years earlier.

Little background. I had a pretty severe lateral pelvic tilt for years. It was probably due to a job where I was sitting and then hours of pc gaming in odd seated positions after work into the wee hours of the night.

Life is a lot different now. I’m very physically active and weigh almost 100 pounds less. I don’t know what it was that resolved my pelvic tilt but i recently started playing pickleball maybe 20 hours a week. I had the pelvic tilt a couple months ago just as severe as ever (it was very obvious one love handle was clearly 2 inches higher than the other) but I checked it last week and it was gone.

The reason I looked was because I was having some glute and outer hip pain and figured it was caused by the tilt (although it has never caused me pain that I am aware of yet, I’m sure it’s the culprit in a lot of pain/injuries). Much to my surprise, my hips looked completely even. I checked every way I could and they were clearly aligned. It was so bad that my wife was shocked when I pointed it out to her originally.

Anyways, a week after starting the hip/glute pain is still here. I’m wondering if it’s just my hip adjusting to handling being loaded differently. I searched but have not been able to find this specific scenario (pelvic tilt resolving itself seems to have caused new pain). The pain is caused by weird things like standing on either leg or sitting in certain positions. Playing sports doesn’t seem to make it any worse. I won’t notice pain until I move out of a position usually so it can be tricky to avoid.

Just looking to see if this is to be expected and what I can do to help with it (besides the obvious not doing things that make it hurt if I can avoid them.

TL;DR - pelvic tilt gone randomly. Outside hip/glute pain that happens when loading either hip or sitting in certain positions. Not clear it hurts until I move out of the painful position. Is that expected with resolved tilt? What do now?

Hi!

I have noticed a change in my neck and posture after I started gym, I overall started feeling better and it helped my scoliosis and headaches as well. But now I am low on money (gym in my country is expensive) and don’t know what physical activity do I replace gym with. I am overweight so it adds up to the problem, so far I have been only healthy dieting and keeping track of daily steps.
If you have any YouTube exercises to recommend, or just own experience advices, that would be nice.

Thank you!