My sister- in-law attempted to wear a waist trainer in my kitchen one October afternoon. She wore what she modestly described as “training gear” under a jumper and assured me she could feel her spine “learning” from being folded into a half cylinder. She tried to leave it on for four hours. By hour four she was a colour that can only be described as beetroot with regret. By hour five she was lying on my bathroom floor, panicked and wondering if it was normal she couldn’t draw a full breath. It was not normal.
She had bought the waist trainer from an Instagram advert that promised her better posture in six weeks. Instead, what she got was a rib cage that hurt for two days, and a lesson she has not forgiven me for teaching her.
I bring Priya up because that’s honestly kind of the entire story but I’m going to write this anyway because there are literally dozens of influencers out there telling you corsets will improve your posture better than anything else can and I feel like that’s a much sloppier claim than any of them want you to believe is true.
The bit where I actually used to believe this
When I was young and foolish I believed corsets improved your posture. So please believe me when I say I’m coming at this from a place of having had just as many deluded opinions about waist training as the next corset clad girl. I bought my first “proper” corset (underbust, boned, lace up the back y’know, the real deal.) from a tiny maker at a market in Bath back in 2018 and wore it under the stubborn misconception it was straightening my spine just by existing. I’d slouched my entire life, that sort of slouch that gets your mum sighing “shoulders!” at you across the dinner table like it’s somehow a full sentence, and figured binding myself into something rigid would . Train. My body. Into. The correct shape. Build a scaffold around yourself until your body remembers how to hold itself up, right?
Turns out it doesn’t actually work like that and I wish someone had informed me of this before I spent eleven months quietly subsisting on the belief that my ribs were, in fact, being straightened.
What actually happens when you wear one
Instead, what a corset does is restrict. Restrict your movement. Putting on a corset and staying in the position it puts you in is not training your body to do that position while you’re not wearing it. Stand up straight with a corset on and sure, you’ll look like you’re standing up straight because the boning doesn’t allow you to gracefully slump forward like your body wants to. Slip it off and stand there ten minutes later and you’ll be all back to your usual curve. Lean against a tree for a year and that tree has strengthened your ability to stand straight? Sure. Lean against a corset for a year and take it off and…nothing. Your postural muscles are the same weak puppies they always were when you started. A corset does not train them, it simply replaces them for as long as it’s strapped around you. Which is why using one with any kind of delusions of long term posture training is the whole entire trick.
The posture industry has ~built~ an empire on that trick
Posture Corset = Instant better posture; it’s a hell of a lot easier to sell than Posture Actualised Through Months of Exercise Bullshit. And it feels like it works that way, too. Because it kind of does, for as long as it’s on. Which, I hate that I’m having to repeat this but…is not what you want if you’re buying something off the promise of better posture. You want your body to hold itself up without outside support. Not cry for acaffine andwear a corset until the store gives out.
So when Priya tried to wear hers for hours on end to show me how good it was I was horrified enough that I tried it myself properly, this time with knowledge of what was actually happening to my body. I borrowed a more modest waist cincher from my sister rather than went full out corset, wore it loosely, and put it on for twenty minute stretches to try and see if I could feel anything approximating “tightening” my posture whilst wearing it. Did I wear it all day, slaving over a hot keyboard refusing to bend so my core could work harder? No. Because that’s not how you show a piece of clothing is affecting your posture. I wore it for forty minutes a day, doing simple day tasks; washing up, tying knots on jumpers, walking to the postbox. I wanted to see if there was any kernel of truth to the lofty claims of waist training having any lasting benefits.
What happened when I actually tried to use one properly
For forty minutes my posture did actually improve. Because without thinking about it I physically could not round my shoulders forward, the cincher nipping at my sides enough to remind me I was doing it. It was an external conscience, laughing at my bad posture in the funnest way possible. But the second I took it off my shoulders went forward again, every bit as slumped as they had been day one because nothing about my back muscles had changed. The act of wearing a corset is not training those muscles to hold you up by bestowing upon them the impossible magical ability to know you’re wearing something else eight hours later. It felt… okay? Again with the repeating, but just sort of…..on? Like someone told me I had to look really put together by 9am and I put a corset on and magically nailed it, you know? Same shit I felt when Priya took hers off and thought her ribs were being permanently manipulated into position.
My neighbour Deb caught me halfway out the door cincher on under my coat on day nine and said “you look like you’re waiting to accept an award” and naturally I assumed she meant in a good way. Stroke my ego and call it a day, amirite? Lace up, suddenly feel awesome, don’t question it. Except Deb tilted her head at me like she did when I told her my guitar was vintage (it is not.) and said “but in that sort of stiff way? Like your shoulders don’t actually know how to relax.” And she was right. Wearing a corset makes you stand a certain way, yes. But that way is Not How Good Posture Looks. Good posture has a roundedness to it, your body allowing itself to stand tall without fighting itself. Corset posture is rigid, like you’re bracing for someone to tell you how your grandma used to make biscuits when she was dieting.
The problem with the corset as posture solution is what it does to the rest of you. While it takes up the activites of supporting your torso, what are all those other muscles you’re not using doing while the corset basically runs your posture for you? Nothing. Your Erector Spinae, the long muscles running along both sides of your spine, and the deeper core muscles are what’s supposed to be holding you up all day long, no assistance needed. Let something else do that for you for significant stretches at a time and guess what happens to muscles that aren’t used? They get weaker, not stronger. So the absolute worst case scenario, and please note I am not a doctor nor do I play one on the internet, but long term, heavy corset wear could hypothetically reduce your body’s natural ability to hold good posture by making the muscles do that should be doing the work too damn weak to care. You’re not training your body out of a slump, you’re having someone else do it for you.
The last part, the part that actually kept me up at night after my little experiment, was what happens when you combine that lack of muscle engagement with how most corsets honestly make you breathe. Upwards of four hours in mine started to feel tight, which I assume means my lungs weren’t happy. If you’re not correctly engaging your core to maintain position and you’re also probably not breathing all that great in a thing ribbed enough to take the rhythmic rise and fall of breathing out of the equation. Does that do anything? Science says probably! Does wearing a corset all day every day for years sound like a health kick to you? Me neither.
I reached out to my friend Hana, of Hana Not Your Therapist fame who is a Pilates instructor and has had to physically adjust my posture herself more times than we’d care to admit and asked her about it. Her response was something that’s haunted me every time I put mine on since:
“It’s not that it’s not doing anything. It’s just doing the wrong things. Holding the shape of good posture instead of teaching your body how to hold that shape itself.”
She’s really not wrong, and that, friends, is where the disconnect is. Corsets do not train your posture, they mimic it while worn. Which, is fine! Wear a damn corset if it makes you feel good. But if you’re wearing it for how it’ll make you look because it feels like it’s changing your posture for the better keep in mind you’re probably just….. wearing a corset. There’s nothing wrong with that! It’s when you start believing it’s something else that you need to listen to Priya’s beet red thighs.
Bottom line time
Do corsets help your posture? Sure they do! But only while you’re wearing them. Anything that makes you externally conscious of standing up straight is by virtue of existing helping you improve your posture in the moment. A corset is infinitely more literal than babying your spine into submission with rows and hollow takes.
It holds you in place, literally. Do you need to look good on your wedding day/watch graduate speeches/insert life milestone here? Absolutely a waist trainer will help with that, yes. But it’s not improving your posture any more than swinging from a tree will strengthen your grip. Your body needs to learn by doing, and a corset is the opposite of a lesson. It’s a placeholder you unquestionably feel better in but would look just as put together with strong core muscles. And if you don’t believe me, ask Priya. She’ll show you her thighs.
