Good Posture

By "good posture" I mean the practice of while you are standing or moving, keeping your spine in a straight line (usually perpendicular to the ground):

This has numerous advantages for self defense. Naysayers of good posture are generally justifying their own bad posture from overspecialization in some kind of combat sports or fitness training, ignoring 99% of physical therapists everywhere. Here's another view on good posture I agree with:

Recap checklist of that video:

1. Crown of your head stretches for the sky, with a chin tuck as a side effect.
2. Slightly tuck the lower ribs.
3. Keep your hips slightly tilted forward so that your hips are under your shoulders.
4. Shoulders rolled back instead of rolled forward (thumbs facing forward, elbows back.)

The first advantage of being in good posture is having awareness. It requires mindfulness to maintain good posture for most people. You are more likely to defend yourself successfully if you are present rather than when you are distracted.

The second advantage is that you appear stronger and taller. You look like a harder target with good posture. You are less likely to be attacked with good posture.

The third advantage is better posture = better strength. Consider the similarity to dead lifting posture to healthy standing posture as listed above:

The fourth advantage is better posture = less injury. Injury is a poor strategy in a self defense situation:

The fifth advantage is that better posture gives you more lower body flexibility. This is because your nerves and spinal column are a limited length, and slide around inside of your body. When your back is as straight as possible, that uses less of your spinal cord and gives more slack to the nerves in your legs:

Sixth, good posture also gives you more upper body mobility:

Seventh, be it charging or fleeing, running speed is valuable for self defense. Posture improves running speed as well:

Eighth, in grappling we often speak of trying to break the other person's posture in order to dominate them by taking them off of their feet. Part of this is because posture significantly impacts balance, which is valuable for self defense even beyond grappling:

Ninth, good posture helps you keep maximum control over your own head. If your jaw is sticking out forward with your shoulders hunched, your jaw is more exposed to a strike, and it's easier to yank down on your head to control you:

10th, good posture helps our breathing. This helps us heal, but it also helps us get more oxygen into our body when we need that oxygen in an emergency:

11th, good mental health is valuable for making good decisions, and making good decisions is valuable in self defense situations. Good posture helps with mental health:

12th, if you want to verbally de-escalate a situation, which is arguably the most important self defense skill, posture helps with this as well:

In several Chinese martial arts there is an exercise called "standing meditation." One of the most valuable reasons for doing standing meditation in martial arts is simply to consciously work on your posture and postural awareness, for all of the above reasons: