Fixing Posture Permanently

I have a joke for my old clients, "cherish extension like your pension", and they love that line because most of them pay for me with their pension (gotta love old people jokes). Good posture gets identified as sitting upright into spine extension; this position is something people often times need to remind themselves to sit into, it needing to be a deliberate choice rather than it coming naturally. It being so necessary to have awareness over is a clear indicator of us not "owning" that range of motion. There's a phrase "you can't move where you can't move", if you had the posture readily available to you, it would be a no brainer to get into to. To improve how naturally this comes, we should first understand what is required for spine extension, a combination of length on the abdomen/anterior spine tissue and shortened in the erectors/posterior spine tissue. If someone naturally sits in a kyphotic position (a hunched rounded back to some degree, which is most people), they have a shortened abdomen due to that default position. Creating length on the abdomen can be done a few ways, the hardest variation is gymnastics back bridge, the more common option is a cobra or sphynx pose. In this workshop we started with a dead hang variation geared towards lengthening the abs, essentially and extension dead hang. This is really simple as it's just a loaded static stretch where we are leveraging our bodyweight, this provides a really good stretch for the lats and pecs too. This should probably be done until your grip begins giving out, focusing on breathing and creating as much lengthen through the front side as possible. We moved into a regression of this by doing deficit sit ups. Standard floor based sit ups place emphasis on the abdomen in the shortened position when the individual is sitting upright, deficit setups can still train that component but the set up also allows for you to maintain tension into the lengthened portion in range of motion as well. Using a Bosu Ball or foam roller, we can perform isometrics within the extension stretch, as well as eccentrics, both at-length and to-length, a very effective one-two punch. For both drills, maintaining tension through the abdomen is everything, it's so easy to lose tension and "let go" of it, but this completely defeats the purpose of the exercise; in both instances we want to imagine someone punching us in the stomach to initiate the creation of tension, then without losing it, either maintain the end range of motion stretch or begin leaning back into the stretch to perform eccentric loading of the abs. After training length, it makes sense to train short. Training the shortened position is usually done through traditional back extensions and cobra poses. Most of these though are done with the lumbar spine taking on the majority of the demands, while the thoracic spine gets little to no tension. We can manipulate the cobra pose to create bias on the thoracis spine by having our elbows further forward; further forward the elbows, the more thoracic spine we get. The goal is to simply spend time here in the shortened position and just get comfortable contracting that posterior tissue. Degrees of rotation can be added to this to layer in specificity to both the tissue and position we are targeting. In both instances, more range of motion isn't necessarily better. Too much range of motion in the linear cobra pose often funnels tension to the lumbar spine, too much rotation will often times shorten the lat more than spine extensors/rotators, ego lifting in mobility training is very common. To finish off we did a strength and control drill where we are actively segmenting and extending our spine within the cobra pose. The goal with this is simply to contract and shorten spine extensors at each individual vertebrae as you lean away from the floor, then place each one back down via your belly button, rib cage and chest to reset the rep. If you feel tension only funnel to the lower back, then we either have to more intentional about shortening thoracic extensors and/or decrease the amount of range of motion used. You can find the whole workshop, an online assessment, our exercise library, programs, concept videos and access to coaching within our Skool Community. It's only $25/month or $250/year, both come with a 7-day free trial, link in bio.