Have you ever been caught humping in public?

“Humping” or what is sometimes called “turtle necking” is one of the most common devastating postures that I catch people doing all the time. If you’re looking at your phone or computer screen reading this blog, I bet you’re doing it right now!

Turtle necking is when you let your head fall in front of your body and you start to develop a rounding or humping of your upper back. I see people practicing this posture when they are looking at their phones, sitting at their computer, driving their car, or even doing everyday tasks.

Here’s my beef with this epidemic problem….

• It’s killing your confidence. Think about a confident, powerful, energetic, and engaging person. Now think about a person who is closed off, unconfident, depressed, and low tone. I bet the person you picture with confidence is standing tall, upright, with squared shoulders, and the unconfident person is slouched forward, head drooped and shoulders rounded forward. The word E-motion literally means from movement, meaning you get sensory experience that creates movement patterns. It has been scientifically proven that if you hold powerful postures that it can change your hormones and reduce stress.

• Turtle neck posture creates damage to your neck over time that can reduce range of motion, cause pain and suffering, and even create nerve and circulation issues to the arms and hands.  But beware! By the time you get symptoms from this posture it likely means that you’ve been practicing this posture for many years already and it’s going to be very hard to fix.

• Hump back and turtle necking causes internal organ distress making it hard to take full breaths of air and reduces digestive function. This type of physical stress raises stress hormone that breaks you down over time and contributes to chronic disease.

• For every inch of forward head posture this increases about 10 lbs of pressure to your neck stabilizers, causing major fatigue problems and tension headache symptoms.

• Upper back humping or what is called a hyperkyphotic posture leads to major compressive forces to your thoracic spine making your susceptible to compression fractures. A recent study has actually shown that hyperkyphotic posture is actually associated to a 1.44 greater rate of mortality!

How do you know if you’re humping in public? It’s simple, I call it the doorway test. If your head is the first thing that passes through a doorway when you walk through, you have a turtle neck.

How do you fix it?

Make sure you read Part 2 where I will break down the steps you need to take to reverse this awful habit. But for now, keep your head up and practice mindful posture. Nobody wants to see you hump in public!