Posture Reset Standing

I wanted to go over a couple of things about posture because it’s one of the things I see in the office quite a bit. One of the challenges that we’re having, Brice can you get your phone? One of the challenges that we have is we’re all doing this. Okay, and often times we’ll sit in a chair and we’re slouching like that, okay. What it does is it actually contributes to a rolled forward posture like this, oftentimes working out, working at a desk, working at a computer a lot will do the same thing. It creates a rolled forward shoulder, and also a head-forward posture. It’s very common to see this.

Now, I’m correcting Brice all the time on his posture, so he tries to do a really good job. But again it’s very, very common. It’s going to create a lot of discomfort in the neck and shoulders, in between the shoulder blades. It’ll also create shoulder problems potentially if the shoulders are rolled forward like that.

I’m going to show you one of my favorite exercises to do to correct this. What I have people do is I want to explain first to the patient that we want to get you with your head neutral, so we want to line up the earholes, the shoulders, and the hips. There are really four steps to this, sometimes five depending on the patient. The first thing I do is have you put the tip of your finger on the tip of your nose and I’m going to get your head back to neutral. You’re going to actually, naturally try to put your head back as far as you can go almost by being a marionette and somebody lifting your head up. And lightly on your nose. And then you’re going to pull your nose far enough away from your finger, just like we’re sliding a piece of paper in there. Does that make sense? There you go. So he’s got his head neutral. It makes a lot of sense to do this in front of the mirror the first time.

The second thing you’re going to do is when I ask you to, you’re going to interlace your fingers behind your back, so do that, please. You want to go palms up, and you’re going to pull your hands to the ground, there you go, and see how it opens up his chest. You want to keep your hands tightly against your rear end. A lot of women can easily just roll the elbows out a little bit like that and you see how it opens him up right here. He can even correct that posture just a touch more.

The last piece is you want to do a small tilt of the pelvis, so it’s almost like you go tailbone to the ground. So just a small tilt. And what that does, is it actually engages the pelvic floor and this neutralizes his posture. It’s really common for that head to keep sliding forward, so we want to kind of slide it back again. That’s why it’s important to do this in the mirror the first few times.

The last thing I almost have to mention to everybody is when you’re focused, when you’re concentrating, a lot of times you’ll start holding your breath, so you want to make sure you’re doing some nice deep breaths. What I tell everybody is to do this once per hour for 60 seconds, especially every hour you’re at the computer, on the phone, slouching posture, any time. Or you’re just wanting to correct this. So do this exercise for one minute, every hour of the day and you will start to see your posture change. And that’s going to help a lot with that neck tension, back tension. If it’s uncomfortable, for some people it’s uncomfortable the first few times you do it, what we have them do is just do it for 30 seconds every hour.

Thanks for joining us and we’ll teach you more about posture in just a bit.

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