The Real Way To Fix Your Posture

There's a way to reverse bad posture to perfect posture that doesn't need to take you six months to see results. It's something you can see pretty quickly in just three minutes. Even if you have rounded shoulders, a pelvis that tilts forward, or an upper back that's collapsing, without a gym, any equipment, or any weights, you can try and force it by pulling your shoulders back and down, just for them to come forward again five seconds later. Or maybe you've tried arm openers, back squeezes, or these random exercises, but no matter what you do, your posture still rounds again. And that's not your fault. This style of training only works your muscles that fatigue quickly, that were never designed to hold you up. But posture is not meant to fatigue. It needs endurance to stay upright, which is why it needs to be trained a different way. Your body has two types of muscles, phasic and tonic muscles. Your phasic system is trained through fast reps, high intensity, but it also fatigues quickly. Think like a bodybuilder or an athlete moving weight or their body really fast. Whereas your tonic system is trained through slow, static isometrics, holding something for a long time, or very slow, time under tension reps. And this is the only way to activate your postural system, because your posture is 70 to 85% slow twitch. These muscles are on 24-7 to hold you up. They do not fatigue. Not many people have postural endurance today. But with this routine, you'll find that you can sit and stand with amazing posture, without even thinking about it. You'll feel the difference immediately. Before we begin, we need to test your posture. There are three points of contact. Your pelvis, upper back, and head. When you go up against a wall, you can see which points are unaligned. For example, take your palm and see how far it can go behind your back. If it goes through and the thickest part of your hand fits perfectly in the middle of your back, and stops midway, this is a neutral pelvis. If your hand gets stuck at the fingers or doesn't go through at all, then this is a flat back. And if your hand goes all the way through, this is a curved back. You can also see if your shoulders are coming off the wall, same with your head. Now this isn't a 100% perfect measurement, because everyone's bodies are different. You may be someone with bigger glutes, which is why using a stick will work better for this test, because you can put it between your glutes and test using your hand the same way. For the people who do have an excessive curve, it's usually common to feel pain during extension. And for those who have a flat back, it's common to feel pain during flexion. No matter what posture you might have, we always want to come back to neutral. When you look at bad posture, you can see the front side of your body is compressed and tight, whereas the back side of you is weaker and lengthened. They need tonic tone. So we need to stretch the front side of you, then strengthen the back side of you. The only rule when stretching is if it's not tight, then don't stretch it. Only stretch the side of your body that feels tight and skip what doesn't. First, we will do the pec minor. Tightness here is what tips your shoulders forward. This stretch will bring the shoulders back temporarily, which is perfect for the upcoming exercise you'll do that will lock perfect posture in place. You can do this on a stool, side of a bed, or a swiss ball. Whatever feels comfortable. Place your shoulder on the stool at a right angle, then tip your shoulder back a little like this. You want to do this, but on the stool. Breathe in, then breathe out while you drop your upper body down as you go into the stretch. Let your shoulder blade move towards your spine. Turn your head to the opposite direction to feel the stretch more. You want to feel the stretch right here in your chest. Hold this for 10 seconds, then come back up. Breathe in again, but this time press your shoulder into the chair to contract your muscles for 5 seconds, then relax. Breathe out, then lower into the stretch. Holding it for another 5 seconds. Repeating on both sides. Next is your quads. Tight quads pull the pelvis forward. Tight hip flexors also lengthen the lower abdominals, shutting them off. So to release your quads, you can use a ball, stool, or a wall. Start by leaning forward and put the foot you want to stretch up against the wall. Keep your other leg straight, knees in line with the foot. You don't want to have your knees over the toes. If you need something to hold onto, have something nearby, and you can hold onto the wall if you're using a stool. From here, you can see how your hips are angled. You want to make sure your hip is completely straight and aligned. This makes the biggest difference with this stretch, so make sure one side of your hip isn't angled higher than the other. Draw your belly button in gently towards the spine, activating your deep core. Roll your pelvis under so that your back flattens to increase the stretch. You should feel the stretch down the center of your quad. The further you lean forward, the easier. And the further you go back, the harder and the deeper the stretch becomes. You might only be able to start here to begin with, which is fine. Only stay where you feel to stretch comfortably. Hold this for 20 to 30 seconds and repeat on both sides. If your quads feel extra tight for you, you can do a few rounds of this. And again, make sure your back flattens and your hips are centered and in line, not diagonal. Next, we have the towel mobility drill. You will do this rolling up a towel so it's thick enough to go under your upper back. Hold your neck, then flatten your back. Once you're in this position, take a deep breath in, then out, while lowering as far back as you can go. Gently come back up and repeat. What this does is helps with kyphosis, which is that exaggerated curve in the upper back people develop from sitting for long periods. You can do this for one to two minutes. You should feel your back opening up once you do this. Now it's time to activate your posture. There's hundreds of exercises for posture that you can do, but this is the one I found makes the biggest difference. The prone cobra. This works the best for shoulder rounding, back slouching, or those who are starting to deal with a dowager hump. Start by lying flat on the ground. Tuck your pelvis under and slightly draw in your lower core. You can choose to have your arms in a T position or all the way back like this. Do whichever one feels best for you. Now lift up and hold, keeping everything straight. Try not to extend back like this. We don't want too much curve. If you have an extremely rounded back, these muscles don't want to work as they should. So what can help is flexing your glutes a bit more and tucking them forward. The goal is to be able to hold this for three minutes straight in one go, and this matters a lot because we need the time under tension to be long, so we're actually activating our tonic system. But don't worry if you can't hold for three minutes just yet. You might only be able to hold for 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Hold for as long as you can and make sure you rest for half of the time that you hold. So if you do a 10 second hold, rest for 5 seconds. Then immediately go back into it. If you do a 30 second hold, rest for 15 seconds. And if you do a 1 minute hold, rest for 30 seconds. Until your time doing the actual exercise is 3 minutes. This is what activates your postural endurance. When you do this over the course of 14 days, you'll see how much longer you can hold it. And immediately after you do this, stand up and feel the difference with your posture and how well you stay upright without forcing it. Now that we've activated your back, we need the core to come back or else posture can never change. A weak core is what creates most posture problems, and anything that's wrong with the upper or lower half of your body can be traced back to the core. More specifically, the TVA, which is your body's natural core set that keeps you tight. It's a part of your inner unit, the most important part of your body. It's the foundation to your posture, your organs and your spine. And when it's weak, your pelvis tilts and organs droop, even if you're lean. You might feel constantly bloated and have lower back pain, neck and shoulder pain, even digestive problems because your spine doesn't feel supported. All because your inner unit isn't working. But amazing things can happen once you activate it. Whether you're a student sitting all day, nurses on their feet 12 hours a day, a mother after pregnancy, or a massage therapist hunched over a table all day. With one saying it's life-changing, she now believes it's necessary for every person. Because it is, especially if you sit all day. And it works for anyone of any age. Most people who start training their TVA see and feel changes within the first session. If you want your posture to really change and your body to finally feel free from pain, the TVA exercise we're gonna do next is just one of many in-depth progressions you'll find inside my inner unit program, linked below. So here's how we do it. Lie on the floor, take a deep breath in, filling your stomach with air. You can also place your hands under your lower back if you have a really curved back. And as you exhale, pelvic tilt so your back hits the floor. Imagine there's a string pulling your belly button in towards your spine. You can also think of this like a book closing because this is your TVA activating. Now some people mistake this hold as holding your breath. That's not what we want to do in this exercise. You have to breathe normally through the TVA hold. So please don't hold your breath. You want to feel this right in your lower stomach, internally. This is not working your outer abs, this is training your internal muscle, your transverse abdominis. Make sure you're not flexing your upper abs or your hamstrings. Sometimes it's common to flex these areas if you don't know how to activate your TVA. So what helps is tapping on your lower stomach right here to help with mind-muscle connection. You want this area to be tight as you do the hold. That's how you know it's turned on. Your goal, again, is to work up to a three minute long duration hold. This is the only way to tap into our postural endurance. So we have to have long time under tension. Now we have hip thrust. What you may notice is around 6 to 12 months having posture like this makes the glutes turn off and the lower back take over. And this is actually a symptom of the TVA and pelvic floor not working. And this means for most people doing hip thrust, they'll struggle to actually feel it. So the way to immediately feel it is by activating tonic tone here. This restores function between your pelvic floor and your core. Because your body is one system, it's not isolated parts. When your posture starts rounding, swaying forward, you have to treat the body as a whole. For this version of the hip thrust, we're not going to use any weight and we're really going to prioritize time under tension. You can do this on a ball, a bench, a chair, or the side of your bed. And you'll need something like a shirt or a band to wrap around your knees. As you extend your knees out, pushing onto the band, you'll feel your glutes working so much more. Lie back with your arms facing up while keeping your neck centered. Not too far back or forward. Tuck your pelvis under. Gently draw in your TVA. Now go up slowly for three seconds. And make sure you don't extend your lower back at the top. Pause for one second. Then drop straight back down for three seconds. That equals one rep. Again, three seconds all the way up to the top. One second pause. Down for three seconds. And repeat. Doing this for 12 reps. Tap on your glutes and make sure they're rock hard all the way from the bottom to the top back down. You can rest for 30 to 60 seconds and repeat this twice. So you're doing 24 reps. This equals to over two minutes time under tension. See how your glutes feel after this without using any weight. And really go slow and take your time with this.