Do your parents ever heckle you about your bad posture? Do you subsequently work to improve your posture or watch it deteriorate? In fact, our generation has staggeringly horrible posture and a large percentage of teenagers suffer from this problem.

Good posture helps maintain the natural distribution of pressure throughout our backs and engages more muscles more evenly to keep our skeletal structure standing upright. As kids round our backs more, it puts more pressure on isolated muscles and can easily hurt these muscles and lead to more severe problems down the road.

It is no coincidence that there is an increase in bad posture. Our modern age with increased technology usage causes not only people to hunch over our phones and handheld devices, but also to sit and lay down more on long binge periods of electronics usage. At school we also sit during most classes and without paying attention to posture, the 65 minute blocks can be hard to manage.

Getting up once during a class to get water or even sitting up and readjusting can make a big difference. We are more vulnerable to bad posture when we stay in the same position for an extended period of time, so getting up or even just shifting around a bit can help keep us in check. Also, our backpacks can cause us to round our backs to accommodate for the load we have to lug through the halls. Try to adjust your backpack and focus on good posture while walking through the halls to improve your posture.

This is one of the problems that is most important for our generation health wise as so many people have developed unhealthy posture. Mine is nothing to brag about either, but for all of our personal benefits we must start actively trying to sit up straight and remold our backs to stay healthier.