2642: The Top 10 Posture Fixing Techniques

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1:06Mind Pump. Mind Pump.

1:07Adam Schafer:With your hosts, Sal DiStefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast in podcast history. This is Mind Pump. Today, we talk about fixing your posture. You won't want to miss this. By the way, this episode is brought to you by Viori Clothing. This is the best athleisure wear you'll find anywhere. By the way, we have the biggest discount you'll find anywhere online. They gave it to us years ago. They haven't changed it. You want 20 % off? That's what you do. Go to vioriclothing.com forward slash mind pump. That's v-u-o-r-i clothing.com forward slash mind pump.

1:44Adam Schafer:We also have some workout program sales. MAPS split in the anabolic metabolism bundle. It's all 50 % off. head over to maps fitness products.com and then use the code July 50 for that discount here comes the show 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 him.

2:18Adam Schafer:I feel attacked. I'm over here like this. Let's start this podcast. Sitting way too much these days. 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 that surround the neck or support the skull to support it.

3:03Adam Schafer: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 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.

3:41and just the accumulation of volume of you know how you end up holding these positions really does

3:47Sal Di Stefano:matter and it affects you long term i love this conversation um i 100 agree just i think step one is becoming aware of it uh step two um once you become aware of what good posture and bad posture looks like uh the inevitable is gonna happen you're gonna slouch in a chair you're gonna be in a plane you're gonna do you're gonna 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 when I'm excited about as we go over these, 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.

4:23Sal Di Stefano:So like, I don't know if you guys do this or not, but it's like, I'll find myself sometimes in, on the plane and I'm like slouching. And then because it's a long flight also, and I do feel like tightening up the low back and I'm like, Oh God. And then you'll, and then I'll literally like, I'll, I'll rotate my pelvis. I'll activate my core. I'll pull my shoulder blades and depress. And like, 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, these exercises, you know, 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 the, how you're holding yourself throughout the day.

5:03Sal Di Stefano: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.

5:14Adam Schafer: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.

5:58Adam Schafer: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 is 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 in more optimal positions does nothing but benefit you. That's right. So why would we discard that and just, you know, work in a direction where we're just, okay, well, this is what your posture is now.

6:37We're just going to keep it as is. And, you know, let's improve that.

6:41Adam Schafer: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? It 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.

7:14Adam Schafer:Like, why is my neck always tight? Like, I don't understand why my neck's always tight. Right. 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.

7:41You're going to pick up the slack.

7:42Adam Schafer: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 can do outside of your workouts to help. But I'll look to speaking to trainers watching this right now. Like this is key. Like 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.

8:14Adam Schafer: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.

8:19Sal Di Stefano:And these are so common that when I look at the list of 10 that you've created, and I connect them to 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. Yep. Because everybody has got some sort of upper cross syndrome, lower cross syndrome. Forward head. Yeah, 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.

9:12Sal Di Stefano:These are dumb. Why am I doing these? Trying to get through them as fast as possible. Yeah, back in the day when it was all about getting you sore, burning calories, 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.

9:29Adam Schafer: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, you know, 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.

10:06Adam Schafer: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 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. I mean, this is like one of the first exercises to really kind of assess where, you know, what we're working with right now in terms of how severe.

10:37Because 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.

10:49Sal Di Stefano:Well, yeah, we do everything in front of us. And so if we are driving, riding on whiteboards, I mean, you name it. 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, rounded shoulder, forward head position.

11:07Adam Schafer:Especially now with phones.

11:08Sal Di Stefano:Yeah. 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 round of 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.

11:43Sal Di Stefano: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 one. That's right. I can't think of a client I trained that we didn't do seated row. That's right.

11:56Adam Schafer:Same here. So use lighter weight because technique is everything when you're trying to correct posture. 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, bringing the shoulder blades back and down. This is not a muscle builder. This is, the seated rows are a muscle builder as well.

12:26Adam Schafer:Prone cobra is pure correctional exercise. Like 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.

12:38Sal Di Stefano:And now you are literally unwinding what, you know, forward, rounded shoulder, forward head is, right? 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.

13:16Adam Schafer: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 yeah 100 there's actually a time for that it's

14:05Sal Di Stefano:approximately 30 seconds right 30 seconds and it relaxes and it allows you to do that i like to go 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 uh that differentiate something from a you know 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 it to the cns 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 a 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.

15:08Sal Di Stefano: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, your point earlier, if someone is so tight and so rounded, I can't even 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 can 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.

15:52Sal Di Stefano:Now, it's not ideal to stretch a muscle that you're going to go active explosively.

15:57Adam Schafer:Yeah, you don't do the static stretch and then do jumping push-ups. You're going to reduce your performance. Right, right.

16:01Sal Di Stefano: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. You know, you've probably heard, oh, static stretching is good. Then you hear, oh, no, but this trainer says it's bad. It's a tool that needs to be used properly.

16:19Adam Schafer:That's right.

16:20Sal Di Stefano: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.

16:25Adam Schafer:Yeah, like a screwdriver is a terrible way to hammer a nail, but it's a great way to screw in a screw, right? Right, yeah. 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 tell your central nervous system 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.