Do you feel yourself hunching over? Do you worry about slumping shoulders or a rounded back? Do you have visions of your later years spent facing the ground as your head points down? These are certainly stereotypical images of older adults with poor posture- but there’s no reason to assume that you’re inevitably and unalterably heading in that direction. Like other aspects of aging, your posture is as much a reflection of the care and attention you give it as the forces of biology wreaking havoc. While there’s no doubt that your posture will change as you get older, there are ways to control and manage these changes.

Posture encompasses the position of your body when either standing, sitting, or lying down. For a guide as to how you should properly position yourself in each of these positions, stand tall and click here. More than anything it appears that once again, exercise (and in particular strength training) is critical to maintaining and supporting good posture as you get older. Whether it’s planks to improve your core strength or yoga poses such as mountain pose or child’s pose to strengthen and support better flexibility, there are innumerable strength training exercises that can help you maintain proper posture. So pick up your chin, bring your shoulders back and click here and here. Or take a look here at the Pilates stretching recommendations for good posture provided by Katie Couric’s Pilates teacher Ashley Patten. Experts also underscore that good posture is the result of healthy aging behaviors, including efforts to support bone health through a healthy diet and exercise. In fact, there is research suggesting that poor spinal posture may be an indicator of cognitive decline in older adults. So your posture may be a reflection of the overall condition of your health and well-being.

There’s also an intriguing recent study out of Johns Hopkins University that reports that your posture may play an important role in how effectively your stomach absorbs the medications you take. Published in the journal Physics of Fluids, this research involved the creation of a simulated stomach to ascertain what happens when you swallow a pill and how quickly it gets absorbed into your system. In fact, swallowing a pill is a complex method of getting a pharmaceutical working in your body. The Hopkins researchers wanted to determine if it mattered whether a person is standing, sitting, or lying down on their right or left side when taking a pill. In essence, which postures most optimize the pill’s absorption into the body?  Based on their computer simulations, the researchers determined that lying down on your right side is the most effective method for your body to absorb medication from a pill. In fact, in that position a pill may be absorbed and get to work in half the time it would take if you swallowed the pill while standing up. Because of the shape of your stomach and depending upon your posture, pills can differ significantly in how quickly they are absorbed.  If you’re hoping to have a medication work quickly (perhaps popping a Tylenol to get rid of your headache) your posture may make all the difference. “Most pills do not start working until the stomach ejects their contents into the intestine. So the closer a pill lands to the last part of the stomach, the antrum, the faster it starts to dissolve and empty its contents through the pylorus into the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine. If you’re aiming a pill for this part of the stomach, posture is critical to play into both gravity and the natural asymmetry of the stomach.” So make note of your posture and position the next time you need to take medicine.