Don't Sleep Like This.

Hey, if you wanna wake up feeling good in your body instead of waking up feeling bad and achy in your body, it's probably because of the way that you're sleeping. And I'm gonna show you exactly how to fix it in this video. Okay, one of the most common ways that people sleep at night is on their sides. And if this is you, then there's a lot of ways that this could go wrong, especially if your knees are caving into each other, if your shoulder is shrugged up underneath your body, and if your other shoulder is kind of rounded forward just like this. And the reason why is pretty simple. We're sleeping with bad posture and in poor alignment. So, a great example I can show you is, if my knee isn't straight forward like this, and it's turning inward like this, not only am I putting pressure on the knee joint, but I'm also causing the pelvis to tilt into a position that can cause SI joint pain or pain in the lower back, okay? And for the shoulders, man, don't even get me started, if your shoulder's shrugged up like this and compressed forward, then all these muscles get long, and that can make your posture a whole lot worse. So what we really want to do is we want to bring the body back into a good Alignment we don't want any muscles on one side to get tight and other sides to feel like they're getting smashed or especially the muscles The shoulder blades coming apart like this because then basically we're spending eight hours a day in this position Does this look like a position that you're gonna come out of feeling good in definitely not right? So here's the way that you can fix this. First, make sure you have a handful of pillows that you can use to get your body into a good position. And first let's start with the lower body. So what you'll do is come into your side sleeping position and for most people what we need is something between your knees. Now how wide this is depends on how wide your hips are. So what we want is this, we want when we're on our side of our body, For our legs to be parallel to each other, not squishing against each other, and not opened up like this, causing a twist in our lower back. So putting something between the knees, looking down, making sure that your hips look nice and parallel, and your thighs look nice and parallel to each other, that's a good starting point. And what you'll notice too, is as I bring this between my knees, I no longer have to come into this arch position to be able to bring my knee down like this. Instead, I can actually elongate my lower back by tucking my pelvis, bringing my knees forward, and coming into a much comfortable position From here all the way down. And for the upper body, we wanna do three separate things, starting with our pillow position on our neck. First, We wanna make sure that the pillow that we're using is about the same distance from our shoulder to the side of our ear. I don't want it being too high and your neck being cranked like this, and I certainly don't want it being too low and your neck falling downward like this. So making sure you have the right height pillow is really important. By the way, if your pillow is too short right now, one of the simplest things you can do is take a towel and fold it and put it underneath the pillow and play around with how many times you fold that towel, which will elevate the position till you find a position that feels pretty good, okay? Okay, so step number one, Focus on the thickness of your pillow and the position of your neck being perfectly in alignment with the rest of your spine. Now, second is this bottom shoulder down here. If you find your arm scooching out like this and your body's coming into this kind of position, like I shared with you already, that's the same as this position right here. And we don't want that, especially not all night long. So what we wanna do is this, we wanna pull the shoulder back, bring it right underneath our head right here. And we wanna not shrug the shoulder up like this. We wanna pull the shoulder back and down and find this position right here. One of my favorite things to do with this arm too, now that the shoulder's in a good position, is simply to bend it and put it underneath the pillow so it maintains its spot just like this. Now this is much better because that puts me in this position right here, which is a nice neutral position for the shoulder and the arm to be able to sleep in. And finally, we have this upper arm. And oftentimes, we don't sleep like this, like a perfect stiff cardboard. Instead, we wanna do this. Bring the pillow out in front of us. Create some space for the arm to come over the pillow just like this. So now my shoulder and shoulder blade is nice and neutral. I'm no longer reaching forward like this. Everything is aligned in this position right here. So if you make those adjustments for your lower body and your upper body, well, guess what? You're going to sleep better. You're going to improve your posture. Your whole body's gonna feel better when you wake up. And real quick, if you really wanna improve your posture, sleeping in these positions is fantastic. But you also wanna strengthen the right muscles and stretch the right muscles to help you improve your posture as well. If you want us to help you find the best moves and stretches for your body, click the link in the description below this video and take our movement assessment.