I feel posture just aggravates existing muscular problems. Its good to understand the mechanisms that cause and perpetuate these problems.
There's the muscle sheaths that have stiffened by the lack of use of the full range of motion and the constant deposition of collagen, which literally glues the sheath to itself. This tight sheath can impair blood flow to a muscle, especially when the muscle is contracted for a long time. The contracting muscle presses out against a tight sheath. Blood takes the path of least resistance.
That lack of healthy blood flow can cause the sarcomeres, the contractile unit of muscle, to get stuck in their contracted position. This is how a muscle gets tight and actually shorter.
When a muscle gets very stiff, a trigger point can develop. A trigger point is just an area where many sarcomeres are tight. We certainly notice trigger points, but the muscle gradually hardens for a while before a trigger point develops.
The hard muscles are shorter and thicker and this makes manipulating the sheath to break up the collagen much harder. But if the muscle is softened first, it can be done.
Massage is how you soften the muscle and get the sarcomeres in it functioning again. Massage pushes depleted blood out and then new blood is pulled in from the capillaries.
But there's still one other factor and that is the way muscles communicate with each other to accomplish work. When one muscle is engaged, other muscles receive nerve signals to help. And if there is a trigger point in one muscle, other muscles are engaged via the nerves.
When trying to sit for a long time, tight muscles may be pulling you in one direction, requiring other muscles to have to work constantly to keep you upright. This is why maintaining a natural posture can be difficult. It ought to be something you don't have to struggle to do.
So you may have a tense muscles but it may be another muscle that is the root cause. All of the muscles need to considered and massaged in a systematic way.
Excellent point... "Stand-up straight" as advice is simply too simple.
Still, I think your good advice from Trigger Point therapy should be supplemented with some information from the Alexander technique.
You see, original article begin correctly in saying that "bones don't get tired, muscle get tired". If someone could stand or sit without muscular tension, they could avoid getting or aggravating trigger points.
BUT....
It's just that at point of being in distress, people just don't know how to do that. And there really isn't an easy instruction set that will tell most people how to do that because... trigger points and habitual misalignment causes people's sense of their bodily position itself to be distorted. Specifically, when your muscle is habitually shorted, it "feels" to the person like that muscle where it should be. So a person who say is told to "straighten their back" will do by tensing another muscle to fight against their habitually shortened muscle. And so in practice, as you observe, "posture doesn't help".
Still solution to people's misuse of themselves also has include something like a "hands-on retraining" of the body so the muscles and nerve learn together what "upright" actually means.
I'd link to Wikipedia on the Alexander technique but the article has gotten so crufty it's an embarrassment... Still, retraining of "use of the self" is an important compliment to any massage.
I think a lot of the problems are caused by shoes, chairs and toilets. We more fully exercised our range of motion every day before all of these things that made our lives easier and stiffer.
Yes, these things "cause" plenty of problems. But not by themselves - our unconscious adaptation to them is part of the mix as well. The pace of modern life also comes in.
I improved my posture automatically as a side effect of improving my nutrition - through some interplay of strength/stamina/tension improvements, positions that were previously difficult became natural.
There's the muscle sheaths that have stiffened by the lack of use of the full range of motion and the constant deposition of collagen, which literally glues the sheath to itself. This tight sheath can impair blood flow to a muscle, especially when the muscle is contracted for a long time. The contracting muscle presses out against a tight sheath. Blood takes the path of least resistance.
That lack of healthy blood flow can cause the sarcomeres, the contractile unit of muscle, to get stuck in their contracted position. This is how a muscle gets tight and actually shorter.
When a muscle gets very stiff, a trigger point can develop. A trigger point is just an area where many sarcomeres are tight. We certainly notice trigger points, but the muscle gradually hardens for a while before a trigger point develops.
The hard muscles are shorter and thicker and this makes manipulating the sheath to break up the collagen much harder. But if the muscle is softened first, it can be done.
Massage is how you soften the muscle and get the sarcomeres in it functioning again. Massage pushes depleted blood out and then new blood is pulled in from the capillaries.
But there's still one other factor and that is the way muscles communicate with each other to accomplish work. When one muscle is engaged, other muscles receive nerve signals to help. And if there is a trigger point in one muscle, other muscles are engaged via the nerves.
When trying to sit for a long time, tight muscles may be pulling you in one direction, requiring other muscles to have to work constantly to keep you upright. This is why maintaining a natural posture can be difficult. It ought to be something you don't have to struggle to do.
So you may have a tense muscles but it may be another muscle that is the root cause. All of the muscles need to considered and massaged in a systematic way.