The Top 10 Posture Fixes You’re Not Doing (But Should Be) | Mind Pump 2642

Do you slouch at your desk? Do you have tightness in your neck? Do you feel dragged down by bad posture? We're going to talk about the best techniques that can fix that. You're not going to want to miss this. Look, you're going to feel taller, you're going to stand taller, you're going to look more confident, and you're going to be stronger. Stay tuned. Here we go. So awkward you saying that while I'm slouching. I feel attacked. I'm over here like this, Well, I'm glad you said that, Adam, because it's not just that you could sit in a way where your posture isn't great. It's that your bad posture starts to hurt. That's really what it is, right? If you have good strength in posture, then you can sit those ways, stand up and not feel the neck tightness and the thoracic area tightness at mid back or stand in line and not get low back pain or tightness and that kind of stuff. That's what happens when your posture is off. I mean, when your head moves forward just a little bit, it becomes exponentially more challenging for the muscles of your that surround the neck or support the skull to support it. When your posture is not ideal, or your muscle recruitment patterns aren't ideal for your posture, lifting a weight off the floor, playing with your kids, it becomes exponentially more difficult. And we are in environments that do not encourage good, strong posture. So it is necessary for most people to strengthen good posture because your everyday life isn't going to do that. In fact, it's going to do the opposite. Well, it's funny because even you just mentioned it, it makes you conscious of it almost immediately. And I think that's important to be constantly reminded of just how you're holding the position of your body and just the accumulation of volume of how you end up holding these positions really does matter and affects you long term. I love this conversation. I 100% agree, Justin. I think step one is becoming aware of it. Step two, once you become aware of what good posture and bad posture looks like, the inevitable is going to happen. You're going to slouch in a chair. You're going to be in a plane. You're going to be in these positions where, oh, you're like, oh my God, I'm totally slouching or doing the thing. What's cool is that what I'm excited about is we go over these movements and exercises to correct bad posture. Once you understand how to correctly do them, you can actually cue yourself when you catch those moments. So like, I don't know if you guys do this or not, but it's like, I'll find myself sometimes on the plane and I'm like slouching and then because it's a long flight, all of a sudden I do feel like tightening up a little back and I'm like, oh God. And then I'll rotate my pelvis, I'll activate my core, I'll pull my shoulder blades and depress, which is all what you're doing in these corrective exercise movements you're going to talk about. And so once you become aware, obviously step one, and then two, you know the things to do to help correct that posture, then it's not just, oh, you do these exercises every time you warm up in the gym or every once in a while or just when things get bad, but you become more aware of how you're holding yourself throughout the day. And then when you become aware of it, you take a moment to kind of engage the antagonist muscles. And boy, does that go a long way just by becoming aware and doing those little things. Yeah. Without getting too deep into the weeds. So your body holds itself in the way that it deems to be the safest. Okay. And it's using lots of information to decide this. And part of this information is, do we have the strength and stability to hold ourselves in an ideal position? No, we don't. So we're going to take the second best or third best or 10th best position. And so what this feels like is tightness or instability. It feels like tension. It feels like pain. It feels like immobility. And so what you're doing with quote unquote posture correcting exercise, and this is a bit controversial by the way, in the trainer space, because they'll argue there is no ideal posture. Yeah. Okay. Yes. I can't take a picture and say this is perfect posture for everybody, but there's more ideal posture for you and there's less ideal posture for you. And the more ideal posture simply means that your central nervous system's holding you in a position that is more advantageous. It's better. It's going to improve mobility and reduce the strain on muscles trying to do more work than they're supposed to because other muscles aren't doing their job. The practice of trying to achieve better posture and more optimal positions does nothing but benefit you. That's right. So why would we discard that and just work in a direction where we're just, okay, well, this is what your posture is now. We're just going to keep it as is and let's improve that. Right. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going through 10 movements. And it's movements because it includes strength training exercises, correctional exercises, and stretches. And all of them play a role here, right? Stretches, they weaken. I shouldn't say weaken. They reduce the central nervous system signal, allowing those tight muscles to relax a little bit. This is important for some people. And then in combination with that, you strengthen muscles that need to be strengthened so that other muscles aren't doing more of the job than they're supposed to do. By the way, this is oftentimes why people feel like neck tension. Why is my neck always tight? I don't understand why my neck's always tight. It probably is tight because there's muscles there that are doing more work than they should to stabilize you, to stabilize either your neck or your shoulders, because there's muscles that are not doing their job. So it's like if we're all rowing in the same direction, but you're not doing any of the work and we need to go a certain speed, that means I got to do more work to get us to keep moving. This is what your body does. Your body doesn't care. It's just like, I got to hold you up and we got to figure out how to do this. Pick up the slack. That's right. So that's what's happening with the combination of movements that we're going to talk about. And some of these are traditional strength training exercises and others, not so much. So some of them you can do in your workouts, others you could do outside of your workouts to help. But I'll look to speaking to trainers watching this right now, like this is key. You figure this out, you can do this on most clients and they're going to feel a profound difference that session. That session, they'll feel a difference in how they're standing. And yes, it does exude confidence to stand with better posture. Not just because the posture looks different because you feel different. So a lot of this has to do with how you feel as well. And these are so common that when I look at the list of 10 that you've created and I connect them to like my programming, to my clients, especially the back half of my career, maybe not so much the front half, but all of these were integrated because everybody has got some sort of upper cross syndrome, lower cross syndrome to what extent there's a wide range, but we're all doing all these things in front of us and we're closing in and rounding. All day long we're sitting down at a desk. So these movements become paramount to all clients. And so a good trainer, this episode could also be titled signs you have a good trainer is if your trainer is incorporating a lot of these movements within your training program, because these are, I thought in my early years, tedious, silly movements for the most part. Oh, these are dumb. Why am I trying to get through as much as fast as possible? Yeah. Back in the day when it was all about getting you sore, burning calories, teaching, wowing you with difficult movements. But some of these fundamental stretches and mobility drills and movements are paramount to keeping somebody with good, strong posture. Absolutely. So we'll start with number one, which is a great general posture improving exercise, especially for the mid upper back. And that's a seated row. So now, by the way, you have to do these things right for them to work because you could do a seated row in a way that makes your posture worse, right? So the way you do a seated row, especially to improve posture is you got to sit real tall. When you row the weight, the shoulder blades need to come back and down. Okay. So you're looking for a retraction and depression of the scapula. What you don't want to do is keep the shoulders rolled forward as you row the weight. And you also don't want to shrug your shoulders as you row the weight. That's actually going to make things much worse. So think about taking your shoulder blades and putting them in your back pockets. That's what I used to tell my clients. Now, this is more difficult than it sounds for a lot of people. In fact, for a lot of clients, they couldn't do this without me holding their shoulders and placing them in position. This is a go-to assessment for trainers. Oh, my God. Really. I mean, this is like one of the first exercises to really kind of assess what we're working with right now in terms of how severe because there's various degrees of what you'll see in terms of compensations. But for your average person, you're going to find a lot of compensation, especially in this type of an exercise. Well, yeah, we do everything in front of us. And so if we are driving, riding on whiteboards, I mean, you name it. Computer. Cutting hair, computer. I mean, we do it all. We do it all in front of our body, which puts us in this kind of forward shoulder, forward or rounded shoulder, forward head position. Especially now with phones. Yeah. And yeah, especially now with phones, we're like this. And so that becomes your default position. So if that becomes your default position and then you put somebody in a seated row, they go right to their default position. And then you ask that person, pull that in. The default movement to that is for the biceps to activate and pull in while they stay in that rounded position. You actually have to cue and do what you said, Sal, which is be able to get them to retract and depress those shoulders, which is unnatural for the average person, yet so beneficial to counter what they're doing all day long on their job or driving or phone or all those things. And so learning this movement properly and then integrate. This is a staple. I don't think I trained a client that seated row was not in every single. That's right. I can't think of a client I trained that we didn't do seated. That's right. Same here. So use lighter weight because technique is everything when you're trying to correct posture. Today's program giveaway is MAPS Anabolic. If you want to win that, leave a comment below this video. The first 24 hours that we drop it, subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. And if you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. We also have a sale this month. MAPS split in the anabolic metabolism bundle of programs. It's half off. Head over to mapsfitnessproducts.com. Use the code July 50 to get yourself a discount. All right, here we go. Next is the prone cobra. So you could do this lying on the floor or you could do this supported on a physio ball. And with this, what you're doing is you're rounding and then coming up. So you're getting some back extension. You're rotating or supinating the hands with the arms at your sides and you're pulling the shoulder blades back. You're squeezing everything back. And down again, bring the shoulder blades back and down. This is not a muscle builder. Seated rows are a muscle builder as well. Prone cobra is pure correctional exercise. This is not for bodybuilders who are just trying to, this is like, I do this to get better posture. In fact, prone cobras are a great way to set up the seated row because it gets you in that position. Then you can go to the seated row. Well, you are literally unwinding what rounded shoulder, forward head is. So as you round forward, you- It's the antidote to that. Yeah, exactly. So you're internally rotating. You're coming forward like this. And so prone cobra is the opposite. So you're literally unwinding that and all the muscles that are weakened, because what happens when you get so dominant this way, these muscles become dominant overactive. The ones in the back that are responsible for pulling you back into posture become weak. And what you're doing in that prone cobra is unwinding and waking up all those muscles that oppose that poor posture. That's right. Next are static stretches of the pecs and delts. Now, why would I want to do that? Well, sometimes, oftentimes, what gets in the way of strengthening the mid-back is tight pecs and delts. They're so tight, in fact, that trying to get in better position, it's like holding me back. Oftentimes, with clients, we would start a posture-correcting workout with static stretches of the pecs and the delts, which, by the way, feels amazing to these people. Now, the stretch itself doesn't feel so good. It can be a little bit painful. But afterwards, like, oh, my God, I can breathe. Everything feels so much better. And static stretching, all that does, by the way, when you hold a stretch for a long period of time, the CNS eventually weakens its signal to that muscle. So what you're doing is you're allowing those muscles to relax, essentially. That's it. There's actually a time for that. It's approximately 30 seconds, right? 30 seconds, and it relaxes, and it allows you to do that. I like to go to a minute. Yeah, so I think that's one of the, yeah, at least 30 seconds to a minute, you want to hold that. So that's one of the most important things that differentiate something from an active type of stretch to a corrective type of stretch is if you don't hold it for longer than that, you don't allow the CNS to relax. So it's important that when you are describing a static stretch, that we also communicate that you get into that position and you hold it, intensify it for a good solid 30 seconds to a minute to allow the CNS to relax. By the way, yeah, I love static stretches from a correctional kind of perspective as well, especially when you see how limited they are range of motion wise. Like, I can't even get them into position now where I can stress that position and add load. I have to really open up first and spend that time to incrementally achieve those new ranges. This is also a good moment to discuss where there is some contention in the fitness space around this conversation because it's pretty well known. Most trainers that have been doing this for a long time know that static stretching before you go activate and work muscles typically is not a good idea. But in the context of you trying to get somebody into correct posture to go do a movement, it makes sense. So for example, if I, your point earlier, if someone is so tight and so rounded, I can't get them to retract and depress their shoulders. And the major big muscle that's tight is that pec. And so static stretching relaxes it. So then I could then pull them back in that posture. So then we can go in and work out. And so this is also why I don't like when trainers criticize other trainers because they may not know that that client that they're dealing with may need that static stretch in order to get them in optimal position. Now, it's not ideal to stretch a muscle that you're going to go active explosively. You don't do the static stretch and then do jumping pushups. You're going to reduce your performance. Right, right. So yeah. So that's not a good idea. So there is a place and there is an exception to every rule that we tend to hear. And you do see a little bit of contention and debate online about this. And you've probably heard, oh, static stretching is good. Then you hear, oh no, but this trainer says it's bad. You don't do it for training. It's a tool that needs to be used properly. That's right. It is a tool and there is a place for it. And it does make sense sometimes before you work out. And this is the case. Yeah. Like a screwdriver is a terrible way to hammer a nail, but it's a great way to screw in a screw, right? Yeah. So, and by the way, when you're doing a static stretch, a mistake a lot of people make is they hold their breath. That will, that will tell your central nervous systems to stay tight, to stay activated. So breathe deep and relax your body as you hold the static stretch. It's far more effective. Next up is a straight arm pulldown. Okay. So what is a straight arm pulldown? Well, when we're trying to build muscle, it's a lat exercise. Is that what we're doing this for? No, I'm not trying to build the lats. Here's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do a straight arm pulldown, let my lats activate, and also simultaneously be able to pull my shoulder blades back and down. Why? Because I need to learn the muscle recruitment pattern that says it's okay to activate my lats while also retracting and depressing my scapula. Oftentimes when people have poor posture, whenever they activate their lats, their scapula rolls forward. Okay. So a pulldown looks like this. A row looks like this. So really this is just teaching things to work in the right way. So a standing straight arm pulldown in the context of correctional exercise is lighter, and the idea isn't to work my lats, but rather, can I work my lats while pulling my shoulder blades back and down? Anchoring those shoulder blades. At the same time. Super light movement. That's right. Super light movement. I always encourage trainers to teach clients this with little to no weight. A band. Yes. This is one of those things where it's very difficult to articulate your scapula if you've never trained yourself to do it. This is a great exercise in movement. Of the ones we've talked about so far, I would say the more complex one to get someone to do correctly. Yes. So the seated row is fairly easy. These other movements, prone cobra, fairly easy to look at it, watch it, okay, I get it. This one's a little bit difficult, and you do see there's a lot more room for error, and so really pay attention to form and technique. Really go light, but what a great movement to teach you how to articulate that scapula correctly. Next up, farmer walks. Okay, farmer walks. Well, normally farmer walk is great for your grip, strengthens the body. You go really heavy. That's not how we're going to do farmer walks in this context. The farmer walks here, you're holding resistance, and what you're consciously doing while you're walking is maintaining good posture, okay? So here's what you're going to do from the bottom up. First off with your feet, your whole foot needs to make contact with the floor, so you roll from the heel to the toe. You want to stand nice and tall, but you don't want to overarch your back. You want to tuck your pelvis a little bit, tighten your core, maintain your chest high, keep your shoulder blades back and down, and again, what you're trying to do with this is you're trying to teach your body to do things with good posture, because that's a skill as well. Can I get good posture while doing a seated row? Yes, but now can you do it while you're walking, or can you do it when you're pushing, or can you do it when you're doing an overhead press? Completely different skill. Farmer walks, focusing on good posture, help teach the skill of having good posture while also doing something functional. Next, planks with a posterior pelvic tilt. I love this one. This was so controversial. One of our first viral videos. When we first showed this, right? So you, everybody knows what a plank is, right? But what we're going to teach here is how to do a plank with a posterior pelvic tilt. So a common posture issue with a lot of people is called an anterior pelvic tilt. What does that look like? Looks like I'm sticking my butt up. I have a little bit of an excessive curve to my low back. We call it Instagram model. Instagram model butt, right? That pose or whatever. Well, when you're doing a plank, when you're in that position, well, first off, this is going to crush your abs, okay? Because this really makes a plank an ab exercise. But you get in that position, hold that position, take your butt, which is sticking up, and tuck your tailbone. Now hold that position. Now what we're doing is we're offsetting that anterior pelvic tilt. Yes, it's an ab exercise. Intensifying that contraction. This was my favorite movement for people with really bad anterior pelvic tilt. What would people with anterior pelvic tilt complain of? Low back pain and tightness when they did squats, overhead presses, even seated rows. I'd have some clients do seated rows, and they'd be like, oh, it's my low back. And I would go to do these planks with posterior pelvic tilt, go back to the rows, and would fix the problem. Yeah, and what helps too is you can start really priming and teaching these people these default positions when normally if they're in a relaxed, while they're going through this stress, it's going to all direct it towards their lower back. But now if they have this where they've been continuously practicing, drawing, and directing it more for the core supporting it, then now they're going to have that at their benefit. This to me is the seated row of the lower body, meaning that it is that impactful for like 99% of the people out there. And the reason for that is that when we sit down, which all of us do when we're driving, when we're sitting at desks, when we're sitting on our podcast chairs, whatever, your hip flexors are in a shortened position. And you're in that shortened position so much of the day that that becomes its default. So then when you try to stand up, they stay tight. And then that tilts the hips in that position, in the Instagram butt position we're talking about, where you're excessively arching the low back. It's a weak point for force. Right. And so this, and why I love this tip, because it is controversial, because that somebody would debate that, oh, plank is supposed to be neutral spine. You shouldn't be tucking the tailbone. But what you're doing is you're not only incorporating the core, which is so important in the plank, but then you're also countering one of the most common postural deviations, which is an anterior pelvic tilt. And so what a great way to add that into your plank movement and so beneficial and difficult for a lot of people to do. And so many people- It's harder than it looks. And a lot of people, a lot of planks you see out there are done wrong. A lot of people- They're all anterior pelvic tilt. Yes, they're resting on their low back and they don't even realize it because that's their default position. And so you are, again, going the opposite, completely working the opposing muscles by doing that, by tilting all the way in. And I think one in maybe 10,000 clients you'll ever have will have the posterior pelvic tilt. I think I can only recall one client. Yeah, I've had maybe one. I think I have one client. And you know it. Oh yeah, it looks weird. It looks- It looks like a shrimp. Yeah, it looks really, really weird. Yeah, which brings us to the next one, which is physio ball crunches. Now, yes, it works your abs, but here's how you do physio ball crunches in the context of correctional exercise. So when you're on the physio ball, put your low back on the physio ball, push your hips up and activate your glutes. What that's going to do, it's going to help deactivate the hip flexors. Tight hip flexors, weak tight hip flexors contribute to poor lower body posture, especially in the low back. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to deactivate them. You activate the glutes, then do your crunches. This is teaching your body to stop relying so much on your hip flexors and rely a little bit more on your abs. So it is a great ab exercise, but more importantly, it's separating the hip flexors from the abs, which people have a lot of trouble with. Anytime they have to stabilize their core, it's hip flexor dominant, hip flexor dominant. This teaches them to separate. Let's get those relaxed. Let's get the core to work and without the hip flexors, my favorite exercise to do. Speaking specifically to our trainers that are potentially listening to this episode, a common client that you will get, you will get a advanced age client who suffers from chronic pain, has horrible posture, and they give two shits about how much muscles on their body or how much body fat to lose. They are purely there for longevity, feeling better. You can literally build almost an entire routine around what we're talking about. Because there is a progression to everything we're talking about. You can eventually add load and add things to challenge, but this is a great foundational program for a client, taking from these movements and building an entire program that is around that. Let me tell you, it's very hard to take somebody who's 75 years old and show them five pounds of muscle or lose 15 pounds of body fat, but you can immediately start to impact the way they sleep, they sit, they walk, the way they feel. What a great program is to do, take from all these movements, build a program from them, and then as they get better and stronger, you can progress that. I think as we're talking about this right now, I had a lot of clients that this was our workout right here. I'd start with the stretches, I'd go to the mobility stuff, and we'd end with the strengthening. Yeah, 100%. This was an incredible workout and program right here that we're building for a lot of people. People loved it too. They were really feeling so good. Yes. As a trainer, I think we all- How many bodybuilding clients do you guys have? Never, never. I was just going there. I'm like, when you get into personal training, you think you're going to train someone like you. You're probably going to train one other person like you. You think maybe you're going to get all these athletes and then maybe bodybuilders. Those aren't your clients. You get everyday, normal people, and the number one thing they want to rid of is pain, chronic pain. Most chronic pain is from these poor habits, these poor posture. Learning to correct that, boy, is that this makes you incredibly valuable as a trainer to be able to teach this stuff. This episode's brought to you by Viore. We have the biggest discount ever available for anybody online for Viore clothing. It's at Leisurewear. It's the best. You know who they are. Head over to Vioreclothing.com forward slash mindpump. You'll get 20% off with that link. Next up is thread the needle. Now, this is a movement that helps with thoracic mobility. This is your upper back mobility. Now, when this is tight, here's what ends up happening. When your thoracic area is tight, your rib cage can't expand very well. You tend to not breathe deeply. It's shallow. You don't even realize it. You don't even realize it until you fix it. Then all of a sudden, you feel relaxed. You feel a sense of peace like, wow, this makes a big difference. Thoracic tightness also contributes to shoulder pain. It also contributes to neck pain. Thread the needle is a great easy movement. This is more of a correctional mobility movement. Great way to start your workout. It's very valuable. Again, you said this earlier. Oftentimes, I would start a workout with my clients. We would start with stuff like this. Yeah, I don't know what the research says or what the statistics are on injuries. I know that low back is one of the most common. I know shoulders up there, but I definitely recall a lot of clients that got hurt doing some sort of rotational movement, right? Something so basic. It was like reaching back to the back car seat or pulling a weed to the left. Doing a shampoo bottle off the floor rotating. Yeah, like this really basic light, but they just moved out of a rotational because we stopped rotating like that. I'm, I noticed this already in my own body. Like if all the things that we're listening right now, this is one of the ones that I have to make sure I always do because I just don't do a lot of things where I have to rotate that my teeth that much. I just don't do that. I don't move like that that often anymore. I don't do a lot of physical sport like activities that require that. And so this becomes one that even myself, I have to do on a regular basis. Speaking to your point earlier about the shortness or short breaths and like having low level anxiety too. Like a lot of clients would come in with like, you know, some of these issues and it's like, you know, to get more expansive in your breathing and really open that up and work on that thoracic mobility. It was transformative. Yeah. So next up, this looks like a glute hip thrust, but it's on the floor and it's a hip bridge and this helps strengthen the glutes and also helps get the hip flexors out of the way. And you're not just pushing your hips up. You're doing that posterior pelvic tilt. And then you're doing it. You're flattening your back into the floor. So that's going to involve a crunch of the abs and then maintain that position while doing the hip bridge. This is really great for people with an anterior pelvic tilt. It helps activate the glutes, helps deactivate for lack of a better term, the hip flexors. It's easy to do. Don't add weight to this. Great way to start a workout. First step to addressing sleepy butt, right? Which is very, very common in people. And it's common because of all the things that we're talking about. So many people have an anterior pelvic tilt. So many people are hip flexor tight, quad dominant, which whenever you do any lower body movements tends to shift all the focus on the anterior, on the front of the body. And they just can't seem to engage the butt and glutes, this movement and done properly because you could do a hip bridge and still not really lift your hips. Yeah. You just hit your hip is still engaged because that's going to be the default. The default is going to be hip flexors lift you up, not the glutes lift you up. And the way you eliminate that is the flat in the back or what we say, squash the bug and activate that core. Then keep the core tight as you lift up. Do you always have them hold for an excessive three to five seconds? Yes. Because we do not do enough extension throughout the day. It's just not part of our routine. I don't know anybody that does, or there's always just a little bit of that flex and, you know, to really like emphasize extension and get that opportunity for your body to react to that is. So I'm with you. It's a three to five second, not only hold, but intensify. Yeah. Right. Because we know the benefits of isometrics. It's like flatten your back and then come up. Hold, squeeze, intensify at the top three to five seconds. Come back down. Just a great movement for damn near everybody to prime before they do their workouts. Especially if you have a client who is complaining of sleepy butt syndrome. Yeah. Lastly, child's pose with reach. Okay. So in child's pose with reach, you're looking for thoracic extension. So this helps with thoracic and simultaneously you're stretching the lats out and the lats tend to be tight in people with forward shoulder because they do everything with their lats. They do nothing with their upper back, but you also need that thoracic extension. Thoracic extension helps fight that upper back rounding. You actually, you see this a lot with people who use their phones a lot where they start to get that. It's almost like a hump back. Sometimes you can't even see it behind their neck. And so this offsets it's opposite of that posture and it helps loosen things up. This is more of a stretch than it is anything else. By the way, when you do this, if this is good for you, here's what you're going to feel like when you stand up, I could take a deep breath again. Oh my God. I feel so, so much better. Do something like this and hold it for about 30 seconds. Repeat it about two or three times. One of my favorite poses. All right. I know you liked that episode. If you did check this one out. How strong should you be? Ever wonder if you're actually strong or at least compared to people like yourself? Today's episode, we're going to talk about that and we're going to help you determine how strong you should be. And also talk about the steps to getting strong as fast as possible. In fact, we're talking about the fastest way to get bigger and stronger all at the same time. Yes, it does actually. And I know that you wrote a really complex episode here, but I think Justin's metric has been the one.