All Movement is Body Language

How social factors affect posture and coordination

The way we move is affected by many different factors: mobility, coordination, stability, balance, fitness, strength, power, etc. These variables interact in complex ways to determine how you will move or arrange your posture in any particular circumstance.

One way to think about the complexity of movement is to imagine the network of factors that affect it. Here’s a diagram from my book, Playing with Movement, based on this idea.

Social factors are the most commonly overlooked. Although they are now frequently acknowledged as a potential contributor to chronic pain, they are still underrated as a constraint on movement and posture. But it should be obvious that our concerns about how other people perceive us can be a big factor in how we move.

Body language

An animal’s movement conveys important information about its health, reproductive capacity, and mind. It can reveal whether the animal is dominant, submissive, aggressive, sick, healthy, or receptive to mating.

Therefore, all animals have highly developed skills at reading the body language of other animals. And they also know how to use their own bodies to send the right social signals. Using the proper body language is not a trivial issue, and might directly impact survival. If you are the runt of the pack and take an aggressive dominant posture towards the alpha, you might get attacked. In a different context, you might get attacked for looking too submissive and weak. Gazelles frequently engage in a behavior called stotting, where they jump as high as possible with extended legs. The purpose is to signal to predators that they are fast and not worth chasing.

“I’m super fit, don’t bother chasing me.” (Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons.)

Humans use social signaling more than any other animal. Everything that matters in our lives - food, shelter, jobs, money, friends, and family - depends on maintaining social relationships. In the environment in which we evolved, getting cast out of the tribe was a virtual death sentence. This means that almost everything we do is somehow related to improving social relationships. Part of what helps us do this is using the correct body language, because most social communication is nonverbal. And this language is complex, nuanced, and sensitive to context.

Imagine attending a business meeting and using the same body language you would use with your friends in a casual setting. That might cause a problem. Of course, if you have any experience with business meetings, using the right body language happens effortlessly, without even having to think about it. In other words, there is some part of your unconscious mind analyzing what movements are socially advantageous and which are not. It gets a vote in deciding how you move, sit and stand. Here are some examples of how this might play out in real life and in sport.

Tall posture

There is something about a tall posture with “head held high”, “shoulders thrown back” and chest lifted that signals confidence, pride or even dominance. Many people feel uncomfortable sending those signals in certain social contexts, and will therefore adopt the opposite posture – lowered head, slumped shoulders, collapsed chest. Perhaps the group of people most likely to feel this kind of social pressure would be tall teenage girls. Several of my clients have told me that their posture was affected by this situation in middle school.

Here's a little test to help you appreciate the connection between tall posture and social signaling. Walk around a little bit with your shoulders thrown back, your chest lifted, and your head held high. Now imagine walking this way in different social contexts like a grocery store, office, gym, cocktail party or first date. Would you feel a bit inhibited? Its not hard for me to sense that I would feel a bit weird in several of these settings.

Relaxed posture

My normal resting posture is pretty casual and expansive. When sitting, I tend to recline as much as possible, maybe slumping down, or leaning back, or splaying my limbs out wide. This is not socially acceptable in some contexts. If I'm eating lunch with an acquaintance, it might look like I'm not paying attention to what they are saying. With a close friend, the posture might be more appropriate. If I’m at work in the same room as my boss, a relaxed and expansive posture might signal laziness or disrespect. If I am the boss, it might be OK.

My personal experience is that in formal social contexts, my back tends to get stiff and uncomfortable, which is otherwise unusual for me. I assume this is because social constraints are affecting my movement, preventing me from assuming a more relaxed and natural posture.

Sport technique

There are many different ways to play a sport, and the way you play sends signals to other players and coaches about what kind of person you are. This is true not only for the inherently social aspects of the game like sportsmanship, but the actual physical techniques you use to execute your skills.

Imagine you are in a basketball game and receive the ball near the hoop with no opponents nearby. You can now score in any way you want, and all eyes are on you. How should you put the ball in the hoop?

You might choose to do a flamboyant dunk (assuming you have the athletic ability to do so) to intimidate your opponents or impress the crowd. If you do a simple layup, that might reveal the inability to do something more athletic. Or maybe it shows a commitment to professionalism and fundamentals. Your choice will depend on how you want to be seen by others.

I first noticed the social aspect of technique playing tennis in high school. There are many effective ways to hit a tennis ball, and some of them look creative, skillful and impressive, while others look boring, routine, or workmanlike. People choose these techniques (me included!) based on how they want other people to see them. It's not hard to see correlations between personality and playing styles.

I've recently become obsessed with golf. As a student of movement, of course I have spent many hours watching the swings of professionals, often in slow motion or freeze frame. A high-level golf swing has major aesthetic appeal, and inspires admiration from other golfers. If you have a good-looking swing, you will receive a lot of praise, even if you don't hit the ball straight! Because of this, many golfers get attached to how their swing looks, even independent from performance.

This is especially likely to happen if a golfer videotapes their swing to see what it looks like. The original intention might to discover and correct technical flaws that hold back performance. But the end result might be a new obsession with making the swing prettier. I have heard several expert golfers on podcasts describe their first experience seeing their swing as semi-traumatic: “oh my god is that what I look like? I hate it!” This higher level of awareness of how other people see their swing might shift their practice away from function and too much towards aesthetics. In other words, the social dimension of movement becomes a bigger constraint on the swing.

None of this means that social influences on movement are inherently bad or oppressive. Many great athletes and dancers become great at what they do because they wanted to look impressive to others. Further, we learn through imitation, and this is an inherently social process.

In any case, I think it’s interesting to consider the ways in which social factors may be affecting your movement and posture.