Posture: The Result of Active Muscular Holdings

Posture isn’t passive; it’s a living, dynamic, ongoing process run by your nervous system.

Posture is often misunderstood as a passive state—a position your body settles into.
But this view misses the essential truth: Posture is active. It’s a continuous, largely automatic holding pattern maintained by your nervous system. Your muscles are constantly at work, holding your body in its habitual postures whether you’re moving, standing, or sitting.

Bones go where muscles pull them. And muscles have no will of their own—they simply follow the commands of your nervous system. If you want to understand why you have postural issues like pain, tightness, or strain, you have to look at why your muscles are being told to hold these patterns in the first place.

Posture is the learned, automatic, active holding of the musculature.

It’s a reflection of how your nervous system has adapted to stress, injury, and repetitive patterns over time.

Stretching and Strengthening Don’t Address the Root Cause

Many common approaches to changing posture—such as stretching, massage, or even strengthening exercises—fall short because they don’t address the deeper reason the muscles are holding tension. Stretching merely attempts to lengthen a muscle that is actively contracted, but the tightness you feel is controlled by the brain and nervous system.

The brain learns very little from a stretch. Stretching does not change the background holding habit. Pressing on sore muscles is like beating up an exhausted worker—it offers no real solution. Similarly, trying to strengthen to correct posture simply increases tension in an already overburdened system.

Postural Distortion: A Result of Persistent Involuntary Tensions

What we often call “postural distortion”—such as hunched posture, scoliotic asymmetry, or a swayback situation—is not a flaw in your body’s structure; it’s a sign of persistent involuntary tensions. The bones change their shape over time and take on the new shapes of persistent holdings, but the Eric Cooper Somatics Method (ECSM) looks at the functional aspects of the roots of posture.

Postural distortions are the active expression of your nervous system’s attempt to manage the body’s stress load. They are not flaws to be “fixed” by force, but patterns to be gently unraveled and re-educated.

Pandiculation: The Key to Changing Active Holdings

The nervous system has a built-in mechanism for reducing these involuntary tensions called pandiculation. This gentle, yawning-like contraction followed by a slow release allows the nervous system to reset muscle tension and restore a natural balance. But as we age, we often stop pandiculating, and our body becomes locked into these holding patterns.

Eric Cooper has developed very specialized movements to address the tensions that make posture. The tensions of posture boil over as pain. His method focuses on addressing the active holdings that shape posture, providing a pathway to change the posture from the inside out.

By reintroducing pandiculation through somatic movements, you can regain control over these active muscular holdings, effectively changing your posture from the inside out.

Final Thought

Posture is a living, dynamic process. If you want to change it, you have to work with the active nature of muscular holdings. Understanding posture as an ongoing expression of the nervous system, rather than a static state, is the first step in making lasting changes.

The tensions that make posture boil over as pain.

– Eric Cooper, Eric Cooper Somatics Method