Exercises for Posture: Video Tutorial

How to Improve Your Posture

Today I want to talk to about posture and how to have better posture habits. But the first thing I want to talk about is why do we have bad posture in the first place? I think one of the biggest culprits is the world that we live in. We live in a technology driven world where we rely on our phones for so much. I don’t know how many times I’m walking or driving by a bus stop and every single person at the bus stop will be hunched over, sitting on their phones, looking at the news, or playing games, or looking at Instagram or Facebook. We also work in front of computers. A lot of us sit in front of the computer from multiple hours a day. What happens when you sit on a computer is, over time, your spine will start to round and your shoulders will roll in and your head will move into something we call forward head posture, or anterior head carriage. And all of these things create bad posture habits.how to improve posture - exercises

So one of the exercises that you can do to have better posture is really easy. I like to do this at certain times during the day. For me, I like to be really structured. I like to do it every time the clock hits the 0s or the 30s. So 12:00, 1230, I’ll do this. 1:00, 1:30, I’ll do this. 2:00, 2:30, I’ll do this, and so on and so forth. If some of you are a little less structured and want to figure out different ways to do it, another way to do these posture exercises is do them every time you walk through a door, or every time you look at yourself in the mirror.

So the first thing you’re going to do is sit up straight. Like your mom might’ve told you, pretend there’s a string pulling your chest up from the ceiling. So you don’t want to puff your chest out, you just want to have a nice neutral spine and sit up straight. Roll your shoulders back and down, and then put your palms up. Your knees and your feet should be about shoulder with the part and your head shouldn’t be down or up. It should be just neutral. So you have your chest out, your shoulders back and down, your head up so that the roof of your mouth, we call it the hard palate, is parallel with the floor or ceiling, and your feet are shoulder with the part. Now, all you need to do is take a few breaths in, and exhale. Try not to just breathe through the chest, but breathe through the whole belly. And exhale. Just slow it down, breathe in and out.

Try doing this 10 times every 30 minutes or so. Every time you walk through a doorframe or every time you look in a mirror. If you hold this posture all day long, those postural muscles are going to be fired up and they might not use to be working and contracting so often. So you might be sore if you do this all day long. So I just recommend doing it for 10 breaths, every 30 minutes, every time you walk through a doorframe or every time you look in a mirror. That’s how you can have better posture habits.