How to Improve Your Posture in Five Steps?

 Life’s Forward Motion

The human body is complex and beautiful. Muscles coordinate with bones guided by nerves to hold us upright. How upright is individual. Life has the habit of drawing us forward and over to accomplish tasks like type on the computer, text on the phone, and cut vegetables on the countertop. Take note of your primary activities. How many of them draw your arms and shoulders forward? How many draw your arms and shoulders back? The likely answer is zero unless a reverse plank is part of your exercise program.

 Because of the daily grind of forward movement, many of us do not stand up straight. Even when we are doing nothing at all, we retain that slight (or not so slight) forward inclination. I am a writer and spent more than twenty years bent over my laptop. I thank my yoga training for waking me and my body up. Let me save you 200 hours. If you keep reading, you’ll learn the steps you need to take to improve your posture.

Improve Your Posture in Five Steps

1.     Neck Location

We respond to that forward motion principally with our necks. Our cervical spine (neck) is the most flexible part of our back principally because our neck moves our eyes. We need to be able to watch for bears or loved ones from all directions. This is an excellent design feature. But, despite this flexibility, we have a tendency to either reach with our chin or drop our forehead forward creating a kink in our spine. If you picture your spine as a garden hose, think of this kink as the kind that would stop the flow of water. Your neck will feel better and your head will rest easier if your neck is in line with the rest of your spine and your head were centered on your shoulders. It is useful to offer a few suggestions of how to approach this more ideal position. We use different examples because different people will respond to different cues. If what we explain doesn’t make sense to you, please message and we’ll think of another way to say the same thing. Personal training teaches you how different everyone is. We like to solve the problem of finding the right words to make sense to each individual.

a.     Leave your neck where it most often is. Place one hand on the back of your skull. Fill your hand by pressing your skull back into your hand. What did that do? Does your neck now feel in line with your spine? Does your head feel centered on your shoulders?  

b.     Or. Tuck your chin and draw it back toward your neck. Notice where you feel your neck in line with your spine and your head balanced. Experiment with your chin stretched out and your chin tucked in tight. Somewhere less than tight, but still pointing down to the ground is likely a good position.

c.     Or. Bring your mind’s eye to your palate. Draw your palate back till your neck feels in line and your head balanced. Move forward and back before you feel the right spot for you. 

d.     This explanation is the most obscure and might not make sense to some of you. Lift one hand and feel for your hyoid bone. This is a floating bone in your neck, under your chin. You can feel it with your index finger and thumb. The hyoid bone supports the tongue and the larynx.  As with the palate, draw your hyoid back under your chin. Test the extremes before you settle into a position that feels optimal. We call this smiling your hyoid. It is a happy thing.

Use whichever one of these approaches speaks to you to find a more positive position for your neck and head. Unkinking the garden hose will reduce tension in the neck muscles and improve your breathing. Proper neck placement is step one to improving your posture.  

2.     Shoulder Placement 

Our shoulders are the most mobile joint in the body. This surprised me too; I would have predicted our hips. Our shoulders are mobile and multi-faceted. Three bones work together to create the shoulder girdle. The most stable is our clavicle that crosses the front of our chest in two pieces. Hanging off the clavicle on our backs are our scapula or shoulder blades. These move a lot to accomplish what we want to accomplish in life, sports, and other activities. They can wrap around our side, move up and down, and draw together. The last bone is the humerus bone on either side. The upper arm bone comes into a shallow ball and joint socket called the glenohumeral joint. This bone moves like crazy too to accomplish what we want to accomplish. Think of what a major league pitcher does to his arm. Left to their own devices, our shoulders are likely to curl forward toward our activities. This includes the arm bone coming out of its socket, and the shoulder blades curling around the side (or lifting up and curling at the same time.) The clavicle, as mentioned, doesn’t move very much which is a good thing. We have enough to think about with the rest of our shoulders.  

To bring our shoulders into a pleasing alignment, we need to manage our shoulder blades and our upper arm bones. There are several muscles that assist with their positioning throughout the whole shoulder system. As a special mention, we’ll talk about the trapezius. This is a diamond-shaped muscle that wraps over the top of your shoulders and draws down your back in between your shoulder blades. As you feel it, notice how it is our fight or flight muscle. When you shrug your shoulders up, the top of your trapezius is doing the action. When you draw your shoulder blades down, it is your lower trapezius working. In most people, the lower trapezius is underworked. To invite your shoulder blades into a stable position. Use your lower trapezoid to bring them down.

Bringing your upper arm bones into the joint socket will also push your shoulder blades toward each other slightly. We call this externally rotating our shoulder or arm bones as opposed to the internal rotation common when focused on typing on a computer or other devices. Rolling your shoulders back maybe a nice way to find that lower shoulder blade position. You are choosing stability over mobility while still holding on to the notion that you can move out of position as required to complete an activity. In general, when we are lifting weights, doing cardio, Pilates, Yoga, and other exercises, we will be emphasizing the stable position. Play around and see what you discover.

Opening our chest and smiling our clavicle goes along with this optimal position. The muscles in our chest connect to the muscles in our shoulders. If our chest collapses, our shoulders will follow. If our chest opens, our shoulders will open or externally rotate. Lifting or opening the chest is the final piece of shoulder stability.

3.     Ribs/Thoracic Spine

Your thoracic spine is encircled by your ribs. Many people have gotten into the habit of a curved or kyphotic thoracic spine. Drawing your shoulders together and opening your chest as described above will help that problem. You also want to soften your front ribs. I am speaking as someone who as a child had the habit of standing at attention with my front ribs stuck out. Draw your front ribs in and broaden your back ribs to facilitate standing tall. The combined correction of shoulder placement and rib engagement will likely remove the curvature of your thoracic spine. If you are still having trouble, we can offer exercises to unpack this hard-working area.

4.     Pelvis/Core

To improve your posture, you want to bring your pelvis into neutral and engage your core. Say what? We’ll take it step by step.

a.     What is a neutral pelvis?

As mentioned above, I always figured our hips were the most mobile part of our bodies. Think of hula hooping or doing the Bump on a disco floor. Our hips do move quite a bit. As a result, when we stand, we may or may not be in neutral. What’s that? When our pelvis is neither tilted backward (anterior) or forward (posterior). With an anterior tilt, the pelvis is pushing back lifting the tailbone up. With a posterior tilt, the pelvis is pushing forward drawing the tailbone down and forward. Notice if you tend to be at either extreme. Notice if you are somewhat in the middle, but with a tendency in either direction. We are all a bit different when it comes to pelvis position.

b.     Why does my yoga teacher always talk about my tailbone?

Once you find what neutral feels like in your pelvis, next bring your attention to your tailbone. We find it useful to draw the tailbone down toward the ground. This might feel like you are bringing your pelvis into a posterior tilt. If so, you’ve gone too far. This is a very subtle adjustment. I prefer the following cue. It is subtle as well. Picture your hip bones or put your hands on them. Slightly lift them up toward your ribs. This will also feel like a very slight tilt, but you are basically in a neutral pelvis with the added benefit of your rectus abdominis activated to support your stance. This brings us to core activation.

c.     We all come with this delicious compendium of muscles that support our middle in 360 degrees. In the front we have rectus abdominis. These are the muscles that can make a six-pack. They are the superficial muscles and there are many deeper muscles we want to make the acquaintance of. Heck, we want to become best friends. Under RA, your transverse abdominis wraps your lower middle like a corset from front to back. On each side, you have obliques. Around the back, the key pillars of support of your spine include psoas, multifidus, and quadratus lumborum. I’m not making these names up. All of these muscles, front, side, and back, work together to stabilize your core and support your posture. We can strengthen these muscles individually and collectively through exercise. Without a doubt, if we stand with our belly and lower back too relaxed, we will not be stable. We want to draw these muscles in to engage our core. A trick is coming up.  

d.     It is useful to use your breath to support core engagement. When we are moving through life quickly, we are likely breathing fairly shallowly. Air will come in and out of our lungs quickly. When we want to engage our core, it is useful to breathe more deeply. This is called diaphragmatic breathing. Hell of a word. We have a muscle called our diaphragm that lies inside our rib cage. It moves down as we inhale deeply and draws back up when we exhale. Inhale deeply allowing your belly to expand. Feel how your ribs expand with air. As you exhale, notice your abdominal muscles draw in. If you pay close attention, you may feel an upward tug on your pelvic floor as you exhale and the diaphragm moves upward. Use the tug to draw your abdominals up and in on the exhale. Using your breath to increase your awareness of your core is a great way to support improved posture.

5.     Feet Stance

Everything that comes above depends on our relatively little feet. We are, inherently, vertically challenged. Yes? To solve this, it is useful to think of standing on 4 points per foot. You may have thought of ball and heel. From yoga, we like to think of two points on either side of the ball of the feet and two on either side of the heel. Those eight points give you more of a sense of a solid base.

On to our arches. Everyone is a bit different. You may have nicely curved arches that naturally lift the inner edge of your foot up. I do not. My feet are relatively flat. I, therefore, need to invite my arches to lift. Even if you have noticeable arches, you can still invite a lift. So, eight points down and arches up. From there, you can play around with where your weight is centered. You can try drifting forward and back feeling where you feel most solid. Rock side to side as well. What feels like center to you? With your two feet solidly on the ground, you rise vertically above. As you bring all the pieces together, you’ll feel how you have improved your posture. You may even feel taller.

QUESTIONS? Ask Andrea. andrea@mighty.fit