02/07/2026
This picture is the manual therapy equivalent of blaming the toaster for your divorce.
Somehow we’re meant to believe that simply looking at a phone or using a computer magically turns certain muscles “tight,” others “weak,” draws a neat red X across your body, and voilà — Upper Crossed Syndrome™. As if the human body has a Windows error message: “Error 404: Deep neck flexors not found.”
This idea has been dragged around for decades because it’s simple, neat, and gives people something visual to point at. Red arrows. Labels. “Tight here, weak there.” It looks scientific, so it must be true, right?
Except it isn’t.
Humans have been reading, writing, sewing, typing, driving, and staring at things long before smartphones existed. If phones and computers caused some predictable muscular catastrophe, we’d all look the same, feel the same, and hurt in the same places. We don’t. Two people can spend all day at a desk — one has pain, one doesn’t. One has rounded shoulders, one doesn’t. One lifts well, one doesn’t. That alone should kill this narrative, but here we are.
And the “tight vs weak” thing? Absolute nonsense. Muscles don’t sit around plotting against each other because you checked Instagram. They respond to load, context, threat, fatigue, stress, sleep, previous injury, and about a hundred other variables that never make it onto these diagrams. Calling muscles “weak” or “tight” based on a static picture is lazy thinking dressed up as anatomy.
What really keeps this myth alive is that it gives people something easy to blame. Your phone. Your laptop. Your desk. Not uncertainty. Not variability. Not pain being complex. Just a villain you can point at and feel clever about.
And yes, horsesh*t can be useful — you can grow things with it. This version isn’t even fertiliser. It just keeps the same outdated story alive while people are told their body is broken because it doesn’t match a diagram.
Upper crossed syndrome as a diagnosis for modern life?
Looking crap. Thinking crap. Teaching crap.