Posture Exercises

If you're hitting the gym or engaging in sports or other fun activities, you may already be doing a lot right. If you're doing all the stuff right and you still have bad posture, we can work on that, much like the program offered at ImproveMyPosture.com.

Exercises that you may be doing that can help your posture; swimming, basketball, inline skating, and using a cross-trainer or elliptical machine. Why? They all are very balanced in the movements, or they offer a large variety of movements. This is good when it comes to improving posture.

Exercises that you may be doing that are either not helping your posture or possibly making things worse; golf, running, skateboarding, stair climber, and bench press. Why? They are all activities that are either front-loaded, or are overdoing the right side of your body when compared to the left.

If you're sitting at the computer all day (like most of us), for your posture exercises you probably don't need to work on a lot of strengthening to the front of your body. Most of your activities (if not all of them) are working the front of your body already!

When those muscles are seeing that much work, they get tight and short. To "exercise" the front of your body, you should avoid anything that will make your muscles short or even stronger for that matter. That means slowing down on the number of reps or a lot of exercises to the front of your body. Instead, stretch the front.

Here's any easy one I've learned. Find an open doorway (if you're short you may just need to find a corner of the room). Use the sides of the door, hold on and stretch your chest and the front of your shoulders. Hold the stretch for at least 30 seconds, and repeat.

Ok, here's where posture exercises start to make a difference. What I learned at ImproveMyPosture.com, was that working the back of the body, specifically the posture muscles and all the spine stabilizers, will make the greatest change in the shortest time possible.

A simple exercise to work on is to pretend you're squeezing an orange between your shoulder blades. Pull your shoulder blades back and together. Hold for a count of "1" and then release. Do that as many times as you can, stopping if you can get to 10. It's way more important that you do the movement slowly and controlled. You should feel like you have some more "tone" to your back and some pressure taken off any back pain.

You still have to do the other posture exercises, but a big improvement and a bit of a head start to relieving any back pain will come if you do more stretches to your hip rotators and your hamstrings.

To stretch your hamstrings, sit down near the edge of a chair with one leg extended down to the floor with your foot pointing straight up. Don't try to reach for your toes, but keep your hands flat and reach as far as you can comfortably. Keep your leg straight and locked. Hold the stretch for a count of "30."

To stretch your hip rotators, it's probably easier to lay on the floor. Bend one leg and pull your knee towards your chest and then across your body. Hold for a count of "30."

These muscles get very tight when you sit all day, as they are kept in a shortened position. Keeping them more flexible will ease up a lot of back pain.