Our spines can carry our weight in a way that feels easy if we are in alignment, but it can be a real pain if we don’t honor the way Nature put us together. Musicians often complain about back pain and discomfort. Here are some basic facts about spinal alignment that can help you avoid pain and injury and find balance for better music making.
Don’t sit up straight!
Although we all have perfectly adequate and accurate body maps when we are young children, through our younger years we may have received messages, such as “Sit up straight!”, that cause us to have distorted internal representations of our spines. Here are several basic facts about our spines that can start to correct our inaccurate body maps.
- The spine has curves. In fact, the spine has five curves. So the exhortation to sit up straight works against our actual structure.
- The spine is segmented. On the face of it, this may seem obvious, but often, when people are asked to draw their spines with pencil and paper, they draw a straight, continuous line. Understanding that our spines are made of separate vertebrae opens the door to understanding that spines are built for movement—bending, spiraling, lengthening and gathering.
- The spine bears the weight of the upper body and delivers that weight to the chair or the floor.
- Each vertebra has a bony projection that connects to other parts of the body.
- The spine has a central space that houses the spinal cord.
- The spine has discs between each vertebra that act as cushions.
Just as the top of a skyscraper needs to be centered over the foundation of the building, so too can our head and spine be in alignment with the pelvis, which delivers our weight into the sitting bones if sitting or the feet if standing.

[Current concepts on the sagittal balance and classification of spondylolysis and spondylolisthesis – Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sagittal-Balance-PLplumb-line-The-A-line-is-drawn-from-the-superior-posterior-border_fig4_264459679 [accessed 29 Dec 2024]
Body Mapping
I have had an interest in health for musicians for a long time, which led me to become a Licensed Body Mapping Educator (LBME) with the organization that promotes healthy body maps, the Association for Body Mapping Education. You can find more information by contacting me or any other LBME. LBMEs are able to present clear and organized information, including copyrighted images, that illustrates the structure and function of our skeletal system.
Adopting healthy practices can lengthen our careers and avoid debilitating pain and injury. By gaining adequate and accurate information about our spinal structure, we can move to a place of better balance for better music making.