No Posture in Death

The Dead Have No Posture

Walking my dog recently in the local woods, I was looking at some branches that had fallen during the storm. During their lives attached to trees, they had twisted as they had grown, responding to wind, pushing resisting, gravity and the uneven pull of light. Now they lay on the ground, dead but still crooked, remaining that way until they rotted into the undergrowth.

A wooden branch records force and, as it does so, hardens around it. Once dead, it no longer has the power to negotiate.

We often talk about the human body as if it behaves in the same way. Load deforming tissues, tissues stiffening and posture then collapsing, with distortion becoming fixed over time. To some extent this is valid, but the analogy doesn’t hold up fully when faced with a cadaver.

For my Poland based dissection classes, I undertake the embalming myself, preparing the cadavers, washing and moving them around to get them ready for the chemicals I will inject. But as I work with these donors, I don’t see the 'branch'. Yes, there are structural asymmetries that have clearly developed from functional strategies. Pelvic torsion, rib rotations, arthritic change, bony adaptation and so forth. Life leaves its imprint, of that we can be sure.

But the dramatic tensional distortions we attribute to “tightfascia” or“shortened muscles” are largely absent. The guarded ribcage is softened and the elevated shoulder has settles. The neck that was probably fixed to some degree in life, becomes freely mobile.

What has disappeared isn’t structure but could more aptly be referred to as tone.

Immediately after death there is a phase known as primary flaccidity, a loss of neural input to skeletal muscle beforerigormortissets in due to ATP depletion (an entirely different kind of stiffness!) (Rigor Mortis - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics,). But without neural input, muscle cannot sustain contraction. The system that was actively holding shape simply switches off.

In other words, a branch stays bent, whereas body stops holding itself bent. That difference matters, because it exposes a flaw at the heart of how posture and pain are often framed.

The Body Is Not a Passive Structure

The structural model is popular because it is simple and attractive. It surmises that force acts on matter, matter deforms, then we the therapist come along and ‘correct’ the deformation.The trouble is that a living human is not just material under load, it’s a regulatory system. Muscle tone isn’t a simple passive mechanical response to stretch or load, it’s something that is being continuously modulated by the nervous system in response to context, prediction and perceived threat.

Over the last two decades, neuroscience has increasingly described the brain not just as a passive receiver of sensory data, but more as a kind of prediction engine. In predictive processing models, the brain is constantly generating hypotheses about the body and the world, then updating those hypotheses when incoming information contradicts them. Perception in this instance isn't a read-out of reality but kind of a ‘best guess.’(Friston, 2010)

Active inference theory, most closely associated with neuroscientist Karl Friston,(Fristonet al., 2010)challenges the previously held idea that the brain waits for information and then reacts. Instead, it suggests the brain is constantly predicting what is about to happen and adjusting the body in advance, so those predictions make sense.

So if the system predicts instability, it stiffens. If it predicts threat, it restricts movement, with the adjustment often coming before the event.Instead of collapsing under load, the body seems toorganiseitself in response to how load is interpreted.

That interpretation includes vision, balance, breathing, habit, pain, emotional state, social signalling and prior experience. It’s not just force meeting structure and responding, but incredibly, the body working things out, moment by moment.(Barrett, 2017)(Seth and Friston, 2016)

Posture as Strategy

Take forward head posture as an example, something that is often presented as a structural failure. Gravity pulls, tissues shorten, fascia stiffens and alignment deteriorates. Some will propose that the solution is correction, but the question needs to be asked as to what we think we are correcting?

When neural tone disappears at death, the supposed structural inevitability softens dramatically. If posture were purely the passive outcome of material deformation, we would expect those distortions to remain as fixed as the branch. They don’t.

From this perspective, forward head posture begins to look less like a collapse and more like a solution to a perceived problem. It is a configuration that satisfies multiple competing demands in modern life: vision on a screen, breathing patterns, jaw mechanics, pain avoidance, attentional bias, fatigue, learned emotional responses. The list is long.

The position may not be random at all, but the system’s current best answer, however imperfect or even detrimental it might be over time.

Thisdoesn’tmean structure is irrelevant. Bones remodel and connective tissues adapt to repeated load, that much is certain. But much of what we label as distortion or dysfunction in the clinic appears to be actively maintained rather than passively endured.

Importantly, active maintenance requires a living system.

Pain Is Not a Tissue Report

The same logic can be applied to pain. Pain feels like information coming from tissue, but research has repeatedly shown that it correlates poorly with tissue state and strongly with perceived threat, context and expectation. DrLorimer Moseley(Moseley, 2003)and others have demonstrated that pain is an output of the nervous system designed to protect, rather that it being a direct measure of damage.(Moseley, 2003; Mosely & Butler ‘Explain Pain Supercharged’,)

Protective outputs however often involve changes in tone. Guarding, co-contraction, reduced movement, all potentially create stiffness and asymmetry. They look structural and might even feel structural, but they are at least in part, protective strategies.

When neural tone disappears, the need for protection disappears with it.This observation alone should make us cautious about assuming that every visible or palpable distortion is a hardened sheet of fascia waiting to be ‘released.’ Much of what we feel under our hands may be more accurately thought of as the nervous system expressing caution.

Load Is Interpreted

We often define load as force applied to a structure, which is true for static structures, but incomplete and unsatisfactory as a model for humans. In living systems load has to be interpreted.Two identical mechanical forces can produce very different responses depending on context. A forward bend undertaken confidently in a yoga class is not the same as one performed in fear of re-injury. The mechanical input may be similar, but the system’s response will be entirely different.(Ingber, 2006)

Active inference models suggest that the nervous system is constantly trying tominimisesurprise. If a movement is predicted to be dangerous, tone may increase pre-emptively to constrain it. Repeated increase intonehas the potential to alter the mechanical landscape and can persist as a pattern.

Over time, connective tissues may adapt to repeated patterns of tone and load. Structure and strategy interact. But the initiating factor may not have been passive deformation, but may have been prediction.

Again, when prediction ceases, much of the strategy ceases with it.

What This Means in Practice

If a distortion softens when the nervous system is offline, it could never have been purely structural.

This does not invalidate biomechanics thinking but if anything broadens it, as it reminds us that living tissue is embedded in a predictive system.

As therapists, we are not simply just straightening branches. We are interacting with organisms that are constantly modelling their environment and themselves. Manual input, movement exploration and education all provide new sensory evidence. They can reduce perceived threat and can alter prediction.

The resulting change in tone may feel like tissue release or look like improved alignment, but the deeper shift may have been regulatory rather than mechanical. Far from undermining anything we are doing, this perspective removes the need for mystical explanations, at the same time preserving complexity. It allows us to integrate connective tissue adaptation, neural tone, perception and behaviour within one simple and coherent frame of reference.

The Branch Revisited

The fallen branch possesses an integral honesty. It has no nervous system and has no way ofrevisingits model and can’t adjust tone. Its shape is an archive of theforcesit has undergone.

The human body however is not merely shaped by force, but it is shaped by interpretation.When the interpretive system is switched off, much of the apparent distortion dissolves.This may sound poetic, but my experience with the dead shows that it is observable and invites a different question.

If posture and stiffness are, at least in part, predictive strategies, what exactly are we correcting? The shape itself, or the system that generated it? The branch can’t update but the living body can. For me, that that is a far more interesting place to work.

References

Barrett, L.F. (2017)How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Pan Macmillan.

‘Explain Pain Supercharged’ (no date)Noigroup. Available at: https://www.noigroup.com/product/explain-pain-supercharged/ (Accessed: 19 February 2026).

Friston, K. (2010) ‘The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?’,Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), pp. 127–138. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787.

Friston, K.J.et al.(2010) ‘Action and behavior: a free-energy formulation’,Biological Cybernetics, 102(3), pp. 227–260. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00422-010-0364-z.

Ingber, D.E. (2006) ‘Cellular mechanotransduction: putting all the pieces together again’,The FASEB Journal, 20(7), pp. 811–827. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.05-5424rev.

Moseley, G.L. (2003) ‘A pain neuromatrix approach to patients with chronic pain’,Manual Therapy, 8(3), pp. 130–140. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1356-689X(03)00051-1.

Rigor Mortis - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics(no date). Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/rigor-mortis (Accessed: 18 February 2026).

Seth, A.K. and Friston, K.J. (2016) ‘Active interoceptive inference and the emotional brain’,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1708), p. 20160007. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0007.