This is probably my favorite connection between posture and performance, because most people have never even considered it.
Your spine does more than hold you upright. It also surrounds and protects the spinal cord, which is constantly carrying information between your brain and body.
That communication matters for an athlete. Your brain needs accurate information about where your body is in space, and it needs to send information back out so you can react, balance and control your movement.
So, what does posture have to do with it?
What the Research Found
A 2021 study in a rehabilitation journal looked at 80 young adults who had a loss of the normal curve in their neck along with forward head posture. Here’s what makes this study particularly interesting: these people didn’t have neck pain.
The researchers measured their spinal alignment along with the time it took sensory information to travel through the central nervous system. They also measured electrical responses at several points along the pathway, including the spinal cord, brainstem and brain.
One group received treatment designed to improve the alignment of the cervical spine. The other received a placebo intervention.
After 10 weeks, the group that improved its cervical alignment also showed significant changes in central conduction time and sensorimotor processing. Those differences were still present at the three-month follow-up.
Think about that for a second.
They weren’t measuring pain.
They were measuring how the nervous system was processing information.
Why This Matters for Performance
Because athletic performance depends on a lot more than muscle.
Every time you catch yourself after losing your balance, react to another player, control a heavy lift, or make a small adjustment in the middle of a golf swing, your nervous system is working behind the scenes.
And this isn’t the only research connecting spinal alignment to those systems.
Another randomized trial looked specifically at athletes with neck pain, forward head posture and loss of cervical lordosis. The athletes who received treatment that improved their cervical alignment also showed improvements in measures of balance, head repositioning accuracy and sensorimotor control. These changes were tracked all the way out to a one-year follow-up.
What It Doesn’t Mean
That doesn’t mean fixing your neck curve is suddenly going to make you run faster or add 50 pounds to your squat. The research doesn’t show that.
What it does show is much more interesting: posture and spinal alignment may influence systems your body uses to control movement and process sensory information.
For an athlete, that’s a pretty big deal.
We spend enormous amounts of time training muscles. We train strength, speed, power and mobility.
But all of those muscles ultimately take their instructions from the nervous system. That’s the piece most training programs skip.
If you’re an athlete in Johns Creek, Alpharetta or Cumming, and you’ve never had your spinal alignment checked, this is exactly what we look at with our patients. The first step is a free discovery call, just a quick conversation to see if you’re a good fit and figure out what’s actually going on with your nervous system and how it might be affecting the way you move.