Improving Posture with Gentle Exercises

If you have rounded forward shoulders,

stop trying to do these banded pull apart exercises to try to improve your posture

and pull your shoulders back.

People often do these corrective exercises with terrible form and they're

not actually doing what they think they are.

Let's first address what's actually going on so we can create a better solution.

When the shoulders are

rounded forward and we have things like forward head posture,

we have an excessive amount of rounding of the upper back or thoracic kyphosis.

This is a spinal

strategy to move us into a position so that way we can better manage gravity.

However, what a lot of people overlook is that the normal human spine curve has

some degree of an S shaped curve.

It's just that in this context, now that thoracic spine is in an exaggerated

representation of that.

So people think they just need to shove themselves in the opposite direction and

squeeze their shoulders back and straighten out their spine and train the muscles

of their upper back to help them do that.

But the problem is this perspective and approach is just training one spinal

orientation compensation strategy for another.

You're not actually restoring the genuine mechanics

of the scapula resting in a better

position on an upper back that should still have a slight degree of rounding to it.

So instead here's a more gentle but way more effective approach to bring the

shoulders back into a better position on the rib cage without just trying to

train more compensation.

Get a very light band around your wrist and sit in a position so

that way you have about a 60 degree angle or less of your arm

relative to your trunk.

Make sure your elbows are shoulder width apart and then all you're going to do is

feeling your sit bones evenly on both sides.

Just try to very gently separate your shoulder blades away from your spine.

This is called protraction.

This gentle separation will get you a

little bit of that curvature in your upper back without excessively doing this.

So make sure your sternum still stays straight ahead.

After that very gentle shoulder blade separation,

all you're going to do is keeping your palms facing you,

separate your hands very gently away from each other until you feel a

minor amount of muscular activity on the backside of your shoulder blades.

You don't want to do this too much because if you do,

you're going to feel the sides of your shoulders start to work too much,

not the musculature on the back of your rib cage. Now the rest is simple.

Just hold this position as you exhale very gently through your mouth.

Let the air kind of fall out of you like this for about 5 to 10 seconds and pause,

close your mouth, inhale very gently letting the air fall into you.

If you do this,

you're going to feel some gentle but noticeable expansion in between your

shoulder blades and spine.

This is exactly what we're looking for here.

So repeat this for two sets of 5 to 10 slow breaths.