The 3 Most Overlooked Causes of Posture Pain

The 3 Most Overlooked Causes of Posture Pain (That Have Nothing to Do with Core Strength)

Everyone’s obsessed with posture corrective exercises, flexibility, and core strength.

And they are important, so why do clients always return back to their coaches and health practitioners with the same faulty posture they usually start with?

Is it the client's fault?  NO!

Is it the practitioner's fault? NO! 

So why?

What if your client’s posture pain had nothing to do with their abs—and everything to do with how their brain is trying to protect them?

What if the industry has been teaching posture and pain reduction completely wrong?  Not on purpose, of course (We want to say this up front) 

The industry has done really well with the education they have. 

But this generation's coach and therapist have the luxury of new science, neuroscience, and how to actively make considerable change to a client's posture and pain. 

Let's explore 3 surprising reasons posture pain shows up again and again—especially in clients who “do everything right” in the gym.

They leave the session great, but come back to the same mess they always do. 

This is an excerpt and the deeper dive into this education—including drills, assessments, and neuro-based posture mapping—sign up for our newsletter. Where we will go all in.

Where Does Posture Live In The Brain? 

Why does this matter? Why does it answer so many questions coaches and practitioners have been asking for years? 

Even though this is a snippet, and the newsletter goes in depth, the core portion of our mentorship education teaches all of this. If you want to talk more about how this can be implemented in your business, click here. 

This next section has completely reshaped how our personal trainers, coaches, therapists, and movement professionals teach posture—and it’s one of the key reasons they’re now able to create breakthroughs with clients in the very first session.

(#1) The Cerebellum & Brainstem Is Your Posture’s Foundation

Most therapists think of the brainstem in stroke or trauma rehab.

But in reality, both the brainstem—specifically the PMRF (Pontomedullary Reticular Formation)—and the cerebellum are quietly governing posture in almost every movement your client makes.

The cerebellum helps integrate balance, coordination, and spatial awareness, while the PMRF modulates muscle tone and basic postural reflexes.

Just look at the opposing areas where these brain regions live. 

The cerebellum is in the back, and prefrontal cortex is right in the front. 

Cerebellum and brain stem = unconscious thought. 

The prefrontal cortex = conscious thought. 

Ask yourself, what holds and stays with you in thought longer?

Now as yourself what would maintain and hold your posture better? 

Unfortunately, many posture corrective strategies rely on activating specific muscles through conscious effort—targeting the prefrontal cortex.

But posture is not a conscious process. It's a reflexive system governed primarily by unconscious effort in the subcortical structures like the cerebellum and brainstem.

When we train posture with deliberate thought, cueing, and bracing, we bypass the very systems that actually control it.

Instead, posture improves most effectively through integration-based movement—sensory-rich drills that engage the cerebellum, vestibular system, and PMRF.

These create real-time, reflexive changes by lowering threat and restoring automatic balance responses.

Clients with dysfunction in these brain areas often display:

• Uneven weight shifts

• Neck or low back bracing

• Chronic stiffness that doesn’t respond to stretching

• Chronic pain that goes away and then comes back. 

(#2) Your Eyes Are Telling Your Body to Twist

Visual system mismatches cause the body to compensate in very specific ways:

(some examples)

• Forward head posture

• Lateral flexion

• Chronic right shoulder tightness (often due to left eye suppression)

If the eyes aren’t balanced, the body contorts to find equilibrium. Core strength won’t fix that.

Even more, when visual input is inconsistent—like poor tracking, convergence issues, or gaze instability—the brain interprets this as a threat.

That threat is then mirrored in the body through rigidity, over-bracing, or shifted posture patterns.

By training visual integration through targeted drills (like gaze fixation, eye-head coordination, or near-far transitions), posture often improves reflexively, without ever touching the hips or spine.

(#3) The Emotional Layer of Posture

Trauma lives in the body.

The nervous system adapts to protect—tight hips, clenched jaws, rounded shoulders can all be defensive strategies.

These aren’t just “bad habits.” They’re survival strategies encoded in the nervous system to guard against perceived threat.

That protective tension may have been useful once—but held long enough, it becomes a source of chronic pain and dysfunction.

Posture isn’t just physical—it’s autobiographical. To change it, you have to change the story the brain is telling the body.

This is why applied neurology and trauma-informed movement can be so powerful. When the brain feels safe, the body can finally relax.

Wrap-Up:
You can’t foam roll your way out of a threatened nervous system.

We can't corrective exercise our way to better posture. 

But you can retrain the brain.

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