Your Definitive Guide to Understanding and Improving Your Posture (Part 8)
The final key to improving your posture
Once you have identified which posture you present with and you understand which muscles we need to strengthen and which we need to relax, we can understand which exercises will be crucial to prioritize in our mobility and strength work. Next, we need to understand the keys to getting the most out of them. We need to relax to get the most out of any mobility exercise and we do that by consciously manipulating our breath.
When we are breathing doing mobility drills we need to follow the following guidelines.
Silence during our inhale and exhale - we don’t want to squeeze any muscles while by forcing air in or out. We want to relax
Getting full inhales - imagine the air pouring into our entire rib cage, both in our belly and chest. We want to fill up our entire diaphragm. Aim for 5 seconds.
Getting full exhales - we want to get all the air completely out of our diaphragm. The exhale is important because many people who have listened to mainstream posture advice are actually stuck in a position where their ribs are opened up. If you have been squeezing your shoulder blades back all the time we actually need you to be able to close your ribs to restore normal breathing mechanics. Aim for 5 seconds on the exhale as well, but you will know when you have fully closed your ribs back down when you feel your lower abs engage while exhaling.
While we are working on building strength in our hamstrings and abs that will hold our pelvis back in space, we want to simultaneously address the upper body as well. Breathing is crucial here. Like we mentioned previously, if your shoulders are stuck forward it is a reflection of not being able to get air into the front side of your rib cage, and doing breath work with the intention of getting air there is essential. If you have bought the big posture myth and implemented many of the changes from popular influencers you might be compressed or tight on the backside of your rib cage too, and need to spend some time opening space up back there as well. Some unfortunately tight individuals can’t get air into either the front or back side of their ribs, and these people need to do both. Once we are working to address the issues at the lower half we can use breathing exercises for the upper body to restore the motion that was previously lost. But, the space we get from these mobility drills is temporary. For these gains to stick we need strength training. But it has to be done in a specific way.
Strength training, done properly, is the final step for improving our posture. It works by cementing the temporary changes we make during our mobility work and layering strength in the areas we need to hold us in this new posture. Done properly is the most important thing here. If our primary goal is improving our posture, we need to do our strength exercises with technique that reinforces the shapes we are trying to cement, which will oftentimes not be our strongest technique. We may be able to do a goblet squat with 75 pounds, but if we arch our back a ton, that is only going to reinforce our anterior pelvic tilt. We need to maintain a neutral spine as we go through our lower body exercises, choosing exercises that bias a tucked pelvis. We need to make sure we are actually moving through our hips and not our lower back, but without squeezing or bracing our core too much. This often means lifting weights that are easy. For our upper body, alternating reciprocal motions will help restore rotation, a quality that is often lost with the most common postural presentations. Reaching is really important to prioritize as it will help pull our ribs back, which is important if they are stuck forward. And we need to prioritize moving through a full range of motion, whatever that may be. Strength training for improving your posture is a delicate balance. If we are creating too much tension or doing this work in a way that reinforces old postural habits it has the potential to set back the improvements we are making with our breath work.
And that’s it! Phew. That’s your definitive guide to posture. If you took one thing away from this series it is hopefully that there is no such thing as good or bad posture. Our conception of good posture comes from German militarists in the 19’th century and has no bearing on any likelihood of getting injured. Our bodies are resilient and capable of adapting to the relatively minor demands of holding ourselves up against gravity in a variety of different ways. In reality, our muscles and joints feel the best when we get adequate movement and holding one specific posture for long periods of time, especially if we are squeezing muscles to do so, is going to limit blood flow and make us feel worse. But if we want to improve our posture, we have to improve the relationship between our pelvis and our rib cage, and moving towards an ideal stack of one on top of the other puts us in a place where we can distribute stress evenly across our body. Regardless of the type of posture we present with, we will need to strengthen our hamstrings and abs to hold our bodies in place better. Breath work in different positions will open up space and create more mobility for our strength training to cement those new positions and keep them in place. Changing your posture is hard, and many in the industry would tell you it’s impossible. But, I would argue this work is worth doing, especially if you are having issues that may be related. While there is no such thing as good or bad posture, being stuck in one position leaves you more susceptible to overworking one muscle group, which oftentimes is your back. Improving your ability to move in and out of various postures will have massive benefits to giving those overworked muscle groups a break. If you are interested in seeing a program that weaves all this knowledge together, check out the Woven Posture Program.
