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5 Exercises to Help Correct Your Posture

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Postural Alignment is an underlying cause of many physical aliments, limits athletic performance, and can contribute to the body being in an unbalanced state resulting in injury. In this video, Strength and Conditioning Coach Jason gives some exercises you can do at home to help correct your posture and get the most out of your workouts.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Jason Salazar:
Hi guys. Jason, here at the Arena. Today, I was going to go over some exercises to help re-correct our posture. Most people have some bad posture because we do a lot of sitting, office jobs or we’re just not paying attention to how we’re standing from day to day. Most of us start to round, look just like this, where really we need to stand up just nice and tall, just like this. What happens is some of our muscles, we stop activating them and other muscles take over which start to fatigue and cause injuries and pain. That’s when you start noticing your lower back hurt a little bit. We need to stop going from here, back to here. I’m just going to run through a couple exercises to show you real quick, you can add to your routine every day.


Okay, so first up, most of the times you’ll notice people have some rounded shoulders. They start falling forward, not the best posture. They should be back. What happens is our front delts get a little too tight. We don’t use our traps anymore, but we’re going to do what we call through a pass through. You can either do this with a pole or a band or even if you have a towel, we can do the same thing. But we’re going to have our arms nice and straight and we’re just going to pull it all the way behind us. As we’re pulling behind us, really pull out on that band or even on that pole. Just pull as much as you can, pass it through, pass it back. Make sure we’re standing nice and tall and nothing else is really moving except for our arms. And like I said, every time it comes past the head, pull that bar apart and keep pulling and then can release a little bit. You want to do these three sets of 10.


This, we’re going to work on our neck right in the front right here and then we’re going to work on our traps right in the back. We’re going to get against the wall nice and flat, put our arms up. As we get ready to lift the arms, we’re going to tuck in our chin as much as we can and press all the way up, trying to keep those arms glued to the wall. Release, tuck it, press back up. Really fill those traps in the back working and you should feel a good strain in the front of that neck. Once again, do about three sets of 10.


All right, guys so next up, we’re going to do our hip flexors right in here. That kind of makes us crunch over a little bit. We want to get back to normal, standing up and straight up and down. We’re going to get into a lunge position. Once we’re in this lunge position, we need to do a posterior tilt of our pelvis. It means we’re going to rotate it forward, tuck it in. From here, we’re going to push those hips forward. You’re going to feel some little burn right across here. We know we’re hitting it just fine. Hang out here for at least 30 seconds, back off of it. Hit the other side, come back to it. Just like everything else, we’re going to do three sets, but keeping it 30 seconds. If you want to go a little bit longer on another side, because maybe we hit the other side and it’s way tighter, which is usually going to happen. Hang out there a little bit longer.

 

All right guys, next up our hips. Those get really tight. That does cause lower back pain. When you think it’s your back hurting is actually your hips. We’re going to do what’s called a pigeon stretch. An easy way to start off with, this could be even a sofa you’re not in a gym, we don’t have a bench. Put our leg up, then we’re going to press those hips forward, straighten everything out. When we’re here and it feels nice and good, we can start moving around a little bit. Maybe twist a little bit this way, twist that way. Just hang out here for another 30 seconds. And you might find you do one side it feels pretty easy, you get to the other side and you’re like, I can’t even get there. That means we hammer that side a little bit longer. Do a little bit extra stretching on that side. You want to even everything out. Once again, just lean forward. We can even fall down into the pigeon stretch and work as deep as possible. A little twist gets it even deeper. Do about three sets, 30 seconds each.

 

All right so the next one we got, we’re just going to do a little glute bridge. Basically we’re going to get our feet right out in front of us, kind of like a squat stance. We’re going to engage our core and then push our hips up, squeeze really hard at the top and come back down and go back up and come back down. Remember every time we hit the top, squeeze. We really want to activate those glutes. When we get a little bit better at this, we can do one leg, focusing the same thing at the top we really squeeze. And don’t forget to engage that core as we’re going up and down every time. You can do these three sets of 10 each.

 

All right guys, so this was just a few exercises we can do to correct our posture. There are many more out there. I suggest you do start to use some of these. You can do them every single day. If you do work at a desk, it’s a good idea to get up every hour and try to do one of these. We don’t want to turn into this and get worse and worse because all that does is add pain. We want to get back to standing upright the way we’re supposed to stand. Hope you enjoyed this, see you next time.

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