Did your mother ever tell you to sit up or stand up tall? Why? Was she a physio?
We have the tendency to blame posture for many of our patients’ problems because posture is a really low hanging fruit. It is an easily observable target for PTs to attack, even if it has nothing to do with the patient’s symptoms.
After 50 years of research on those with spinal pain, there is not a single long-term study to show that a patient’s posture can actually be changed through a physical intervention of exercises or manual therapies. If anything, I would argue changing people’s mental health can change their posture!
Sure, short term postural correction may be beneficial, but does it actually change a person’s long term posture?
A human being is so complex and any attempts to simply blame a single factor such as posture is very mechanistic and not realistic of the complex biospsychosocial model required for pain management.
In case you are interested, this is my favourite postural “correction” exercise, it is the 10 second Brrr technique, a part of my short online course on posture with Embodia.