I got a book with lots of helpful diagrams. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979303605/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979303605/ I found it to be immense

I got a book with lots of helpful diagrams. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979303605/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0979303605/ I found it to be immensely helpful, and my posture is now dramatically improved. The suggestions are clear and actionable. I'd try to explain them here, but honestly the book will do it way better. I think that the key for me is to check in with my muscles. When my posture isn't right, I can feel it because the muscles on one side or another (or forward and backwards) of my spine or neck are slightly tense. I've found that not everyone seems to be able to monitor whether a muscle is engaged or not, but if you can, that's a tell-tale sign that your posture isn't neutral. I learned this technique from many years of karate, honestly no idea if it's transferrable if you don't do any physical activity. I feel like it should be possible, but maybe 10% of people I've described it to can feel it. Other thing that I know for sure is that physical activity will repair a lot of the damage you can do to your body. When I don't do karate for more than about three weeks, my lower back starts hurting (old injury). Regularly not just stretching it out, but working the muscles in those areas by rotating at the hips (in my case with karate punches) smoothly and repeatedly seems to get a lot of blood flow to the affected area, work out deep muscle spasms that are pulling my spine out of alignment, and basically smooths out the action of the joints in the spine. I'm not sure biking or running would help, but I bet swimming would. Needs to be a fairly full body exercise with rotation action around the axis of your spine I think... at least for lower back.