Good posture "stacks" your joints naturally one on top of the other so that the muscles work less against gravity to hold you upright. This leads to less strain and joint pain, as well as fewer tension-based headaches and back aches.
Here are three tips to improve your posture.
1. Correct breathing
Correct breathing turns on the correct nervous system responses you want in your body to stay relaxed and in the right position.Because of constant stress most of us tend to stay in a chronically tense state.This is reflected in breathing through our mouth, and into our chest. When a person is stressed or scarred or startled (imagine being frightened by a wild animal), we "gasp" and breath through our mouth, and into our chest, activating the fight or flight response.Instead, in most situations (except high intensity exercise or fear) we should breathe in through our nose and into our tummy.The best way to learn this is by lying face up on a bench or bed. From this position, place a light object like a small book on your tummy. When you breathe, use your nose, and breathe into your tummy so the book rises up and breathe out through your mouth so the book goes down.If you do this wrongly, you will use your chest and the book will hardly move at all.Practice this lying down as it is the easiest way to learn.Once you can make the book go up and down, then start to integrate the chest into the breathing. Breathe in (nose) to tummy, then once the tummy is full, continue breathing in to fill the chest. Exhale gently through your mouth.That's the way to train breathing.
2. Correct habits
Tall - Make yourself as "tall" as possible. You know like in your school days when you were made to check your height each year? Yup Just like that, we all made ourselves as "tall" as possible. This cue opens up the chest, gets rid of slouching, rotates your upper arms externally (as opposed to internally when we are driving, typing, reading etc), points our chest forward and get our head up and straight.
Thin - Make yourself "thin". Imagine you are buttoning tight pants. You suck your belly button in slightly to make your tummy smaller. This activates the deep muscles of the abdominal that keep your hip and spine alignment good. It prevents lower back problems and helps keep your pelvis level so that all the muscles around your hips can work in the most efficient way.
Double Chin - I would say that the majority of people have rounded upper backs and a forward head position. That means that when they enter a room, their head enters before their chest. No matter your gender or pectoral development, your chest should enter a room before your head. To help fix this, make yourself a "double chin". This will be HARD for those of you who have been having the forward head position for a long time but work at it.
3. Take a relaxing position using a foam roller
Take up this position for 20 mins continuously. We are trying to reverse the slouched, head forward, chest slumped position of daily life. It takes at least 20 mins for your connective tissue to make physical changes to its structure. This "opened up" position is properly done as below:
- Chest up
- Head and butt supported by the foam roller
- Hands out and chest mildly stretched apart
- Hands open with a light weight on the thumb side holding them open
Get up after 20 mins or more continuously in this position, and see how much more upright you feel.
This is also excellent to do before exercise because good posture leads to good nerve signals down your spine, and thus stronger signals into your muscles which lead to better performance
By Coach Jon | Fit To Post Sports
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