The Daily Jog

B) Strengthen the “good posture” muscles that are too weak and relax the “poor posture” muscles that work the most when slouching

When you have bad posture, your neck and immediate upper back are the muscles that gather all the tension and are working the most when sitting with poor posture. When you do this, you don’t use the mid-back muscles and they become weak, and you need these muscles in order to obtain good posture. So just do the reverse of what you’ve been doing- stop using the neck muscles and start using the mid-back ones, and you’ll weaken the “poor posture” muscles and strengthen the “good posture” ones.

Here’s how:

1) The Ribbon Trick

“Do this so when you’re sitting at the computer, you’ll know you’re slumping when you notice slack in that ribbon, and then you can immediately reposition your rib cage again,” says Novak. “People will be amazed that they’ll see slack in the ribbon a million times when they first try this because they don’t even realize they crane their heads forward.”

• Grab a ribbon and cut it so it’s as long as your torso
• When you’re siting at the computer shift your rib cage up. Imagine there is a string attached from the breast bone to the ceiling, and then the string tightens, so it brings the rib cage up an inch or two. (This, by the way, is where the rib cage should ALWAYS be).
• Stay in that position and pin the ribbon about chest level to your shirt. Then pull the ribbon down tight and pin it to the bottom of your shirt.
• Start working.
• Try to stay in good posture for 5-10 minutes at a time.

Notice how much thinner I look with better posture. Slouching for too long can  train the body to stay in that position, making you look chubbier than you really are even when you’re standing. With good posture, “you immediately make your mid section an inch or two slimmer,” says Novak.

2) Contractions

• Shift your rib cage up an inch or two.
• Pull the shoulder back and then shift them down toward your lower back.
• Hold the contraction for a slow count of ten.
• Do this multiple times a day. You can be standing or sitting.

“When you do that, it takes the tension off your neck muscles, and those mid-back muscles contract and strengthen,” says Novak. “It makes a huge difference in ‘unrounding’ the shoulders and strengthen the mid-back.”

For more posture tips, continue scrolling or click on the following:

Posture Part 2-A:  The ABCs For A Healthier And More Attractive You 

Posture Part 2-C: Change the work station 

For the most part, being in shape has lots to do with having healthy habits, such as eating right, exercising often and getting enough sleep. But many people tend to forget that having good posture is also an important healthy habit that plays a huge role in staying physically fit. Having a poor-posture habit can compromise your overall health, just like having a poor eating habit would. It can lead to arthritis, cause digestion problems, and obviously, back pain, but it also can really affect the way you look, such as making your waistline 2 inches wider, and of course, making you have a hunch back.

But a hunch back is inevitable when we’re older, right? No, absolutely not. The truth is, from skin care to weight-gain, most people wait until it’s too late to start improving themselves, and the answer to becoming the healthiest and best looking you in the future is having healthy habits now while your young.

So don’t wait until you’re permanently slouching over to start focusing on your posture… start now! You won’t regret it when you’re 40.

Posture experts and authors, Janice Novak and Mary Bond, gave us a few tips when it comes to sitting up straight.  For more tips, you can purchase Novak’s book, Posture, Get it Straight!, and Mary Bond’s, The New Rules of Posture: How to Sit, Stand and Move in the Modern World.

Novak and Bond’s Posture Tips

A) Be aware of alignment!

The body’s joints always need to be aligned, otherwise, the body cannot function properly, especially when it comes to movement and other things like digestion.

“How you assess good posture is that from a side view, your ear, your shoulder, your hip, your knee, and your ankle should line up vertically,” says Novak. “And for most people, if you look at them at a side view, everything is all over the place.”

Here’s how to be aware of your alignment:

1) Put the attention to the knees

• “Make sure they are not locking back because when they are locked, you throw your lower back out,” says Novak. “You curve all your spinal curves out of alignment.”
• Look at the “lumbar lordosis” picture above for an example.

 2) Take your hands off your hips

• “It’s a way of sinking into yourself. That hand on the hip position has actually become fashionable, but it’s a lazy use of the structure,” says Bond. “What you’re doing is resting your shoulder girdle and your chest on your hip rather than allowing the spine to really rise up out of the pelvis and support your torso the way it should be doing.”
• Also, standing with your arms crossed can be equally as damaging.

3) Get supportive shoes

• “If the feet are too flat, then what tends to happen is that the knees start to assume the function to support the rest of the body,” says Bond. “So the knees will become hyper-extended or locked, and that causes bad posture.”

For more posture tips, continue scrolling or click on the following:

Posture Part 2-B: Strengthen the muscles that have gotten too weak

Posture Part 2-C: Change the work station 

Technology has changed our lives in countless of ways.  It’s changed the way we communicate, transformed the way we work and it even exposed us to new forms of entertainment. From cell phones, to laptops, to driving cars, technology has revolutionized our modern-day lifestyle, and our posture is evolving right along with it.

Poor posture is the number one cause for back and neck problems and statistics show that 80 percent of Americans will suffer from back pain in their lifetime. Experts say a large part of today’s modern posture has to do with the evolution of technology and the inactivity that it demands. Before technology, sitting down wasn’t something people wanted to do or even could do often – work meant hunting, traveling meant walking and entertainment was an outdoor activity. But in today’s world, most of our daily duties, such as our jobs and transportation, require us to sit, which is damaging to our back bones.

“What’s happening is that computers, cell phones and all this technology that we have makes people sit abnormal and it makes people lose the curvature of the neck,” says Dr. Matthew DeMoss who has been a chiropractor for 15 years and is currently practicing at DeMoss Chiropractic in Orange, Calif.

Laptops, experts say, are the biggest posture destroyers because of the way they force the back and neck to curve.

“The first and foremost cause [of bad posture] in this day and age are laptops because people do use them for work and entertainment,” says Janice Novak, author of the 1999 book, Posture, Get it Straight!. “People constantly crane their heads forward so they get that kind of vulture posture, you know, when your head hangs really far from your shoulders.”

Having a hunch back isn’t so much an elderly problem anymore. Statistics show that kids as young as middle schoolers are now going to doctors for back, shoulder and neck pain associated with bad posture. It used to be that once people hit their 40s or 50s, they would start to round over, but unfortunately, kids who were born in the year 1990 and after are experiencing the old-grandma symptoms.

“I see young patients all the time,” says Dr. Demoss. “I see kids with the phones and the games, looking down with bad posture for hours. That’s typically why young people come in.”

According to Novak who also teaches posture workshops and seminars in Minneapolis, Minn., poor posture throws all your joints out of alignment, and is most dangerous among young children whose bones are still growing because it will result in back and neck problems as they get older.

“[Poor Posture] makes it so your joints no longer fit together the way they’re supposed to, and this is what causes some muscles to work really hard to stabilize the joints while other muscles just get weaker and weaker, ” she says.

For 24-year-old, Alisha Albinder, visiting a chiropractor has been the norm ever since she was 14.  At a young age, Albinder, 5’8, was always the tallest amongst her friends and often slouched to fit in. She admits, she was never really aware of her posture until her back pain became unbearable and was constantly hurting throughout the day.

“Basically I never had good posture,” says Albinder who is currently working as a produce buyer at Fresh Direct in New York City, a nine-to-five job that, ironically enough, requires her to sit and work on a computer all day . “I went to the chiropractor and what happened was that because of my bad posture, the bones in my neck started growing together, so I lost the curve in my neck and the curve in my back. Because of that, it was making my spine work hard to compensate the extra pressure.”

Experts say the head weighs 8-10 pounds, and for every inch a person’s head goes forward, 8-10 more pounds of pressure is being put on the spine, and this can affect the nervous system causing chronic pain, according to a new Jordan Valley Innovation Center study conducted earlier this year.

“The study showed that pain in  your head and neck muscles, because of poor posture, can actually cause sensitization of the nerves,” says Dr. Paul Durham, a researcher of the study and is also the director of the Center for Biomedical and Life Sciences at Missouri State University. “Those muscles in your head and neck – basically the nerve fibers for those actually project to the same place in the spinal cord that the nerves do that are involved with migraines.”

Poor posture can also make you look fatter than you really are.

“When you slump forward, you’re pressing on all of your organs in the body and they have no where to go but press down and out against your belly muscle, and that immediately makes your middle section a couple inches wider,” says Novak who adds that the organ compaction also causes digestion and circulation problems.

Along with migraines and unfavorable appearance, there are other disadvantages of bad posture when it comes to your overall health. It lowers breathing capacity as much as 30 percent and it also puts you more at risk for injury when you are active because the joints are not aligned. Studies have also shown that bad posture affects the way people perceive you, often judging you as weak or lacking confidence.

“Posture is way more important than people even realize,” says Novak.

Continually practicing bad posture becomes a “vicious cycle,” she says, because  the muscles needed for good posture continue to become weaker and the muscles used during bad posture become tighter, which gradually results in a more exaggerated hunch.

“The ones that get weaker are the muscles right across the mid-back and the muscles right across the back of the shoulders because [they] are in a stretched position,” says Novak. “If you think of somebody sitting at their computer, they’re craning their head forward and automatically their upper back curves forward too, so the neck muscles are the ones that are gathering the tension and causes pain. It’s the neck and immediate upper back that are working the most when sitting with poor posture.”

The solution to all of this is weakening the the neck and upper back muscles used during bad posture by not using them, and using the mid-back muscles instead to strengthen them and to keep you up straight. “The good news is, that’s why it’s easy to correct poor posture. Its just a matter of, you know, strengthening and putting your attention to some of those muscles that have gotten too weak.”

For tips to improving posture, tune in to next week’s Posture Part 2 post 😉