Hey there, my name is Nickolas McKeever and I’m a personal trainer in Oregon. More often than not clients and friends will come to me looking for help with their posture. I know personally having poor posture has made me feel pretty sore from day to day. My purpose with this post is to help you with some simple at home exercises to aid in fixing your posture and resetting your natural biomechanics.
Let’s jump right into things.
What Causes Poor Posture?
More often than not poor posture is caused from poor physical habits and modern day life. For many folks, poor posture originates from being hunched at a computer all day for their jobs. Other people may develop it from stressful ways they sit or lay during the night time. Poor posture is all around us, but it doesn’t have to keep you in pain like it does with so many individuals.
How To Fight Poor Posture at Home
With just a few simple daily stretches and isometric exercises you can do at home you can see significant improvements in your posture. Even more than that, if done over time it can help your day to day life and how you feel regularly.
Steps to Correcting Posture
- I want you to start by recognizing how your body is at the current moment. I want you to sit down in a chair or somewhere comfortable and lift your chest to the ceiling. Imagine you have a string that’s connected to your chest and it’s trying to lift you to the ceiling. You might feel a weight being lifted off your back, the rounding should be getting released and your spine should be going back to a neutral position when you do this. This feeling is what you want to simulate with your normal posture.
- Next, I want you to bring your shoulders up to your ears and to slowly un-shrug them and try to see how far your shoulders will actually go. We tend to hold stress and tensioned positions in our posture by shrugging our shoulders to our ears. By forcibly shrugging them and consciously drawing them down, we really focus on how tight and our back is on a day to day basis and it allows us to see what we should be feeling like with the correct posture.
- For the third step, I’ll want you to assume a knee and hands on ground position (please feel free to use a yoga mat to protect your bones.) We’re going to be borrowing a movement from yoga called the cat cow. What the cat cow does is it moves our spine both through depression and protraction for our spine and scapula (the shoulder bone.) This helps you stretch and move your spine which tends to take a beating during extended sitting bouts. It also again teaches you kinetically about how far your spine can move comfortably and it loosens up all the muscles of your front and back as your switch between the two positions.
- As for step four, I want you to fold forward as if you we’re trying to stretch and touch your toes. This will depend on your flexibility quite a bit, don’t force anything! This stretch should feel extremely tight in your legs and lower back. That’s okay, just don’t stretch to the point of pain! This stretch should really help loosen your lower back and hamstrings which tend to shorten during the workday. We need to make sure to stretch our muscles after they’ve shortened so they maintain correct length and provide us with our correct range of motion.
- Breath! Take a moment to listen to your body and see how it feels after following this routine. Does your back and chest feel less tight? Really take a moment to scan your body internally and recognize the differences you feel.
That Should Get You Started!
Progress comes through consistency, doing this routine once will only provide temporary relief of poor posture pains. Making sure to do this routine every day will help you regain not only your posture but also the functionality and biomechanics you once had. No longer will you wake up sore and hunching over your desk at work.
I hope this short guide helps you feel better and I want to thank Alex for having me write for the site. I really am humbled to be able to work with someone of their caliber.
Thank you again,
-Nickolas McKeever from unmeasuredfitness.com , a website for learning how to regain your body’s own strength.