How to Finally "Fix" Your Posture

[00:00] Hey friends, this is how my posture used to look, like 15 years ago, maybe more. In fact, when they showed me this chart in school, I was thinking, I'm only like a level three on this. I don't even get hand tools yet. This is the exact same spot, too, and now we can leave the spot.

[00:15] This is how I finally fixed my posture, and more importantly, how you can too. Back then, people used to always tell me to stand up straight, and I would. But then I would get tired, and then I would slouch again. Come to find out later on that standing up straight all the time is neither necessary,

[00:28] nor necessarily good for us. I guess they used to do this in finishing school to remind you to have a better posture? I probably would have failed. There we go. Just like with many things in life, there's a reason we might gravitate towards a slight curvature.

[00:40] It's sometimes just more comfortable. So if you set up straight before clicking this video, you don't have to stay that way. But it's good to have options, right? I've looked at a lot of posture content across the internet and found three main things. One, while posture doesn't need to be fixed, doing posture exercises is usually worth

[00:55] while because it makes people feel better and gives them more options. Two, these posture exercises usually strengthen weak muscles and stretch tight ones. Which is something we should do anyway. And three, there are two or three different exercises that cover all these bases that almost everyone seems to like.

[01:07] And they're good exercises in their own right, so you can do them even if you don't have posture issues. I don't know if they'll work for you, but I have a hunch. Wait, wait, please come back. I'm sorry, I thought that was funny, but now I stand corrected. So the first exercise is a wall slide, and we're going to change locations because this wall

[01:24] isn't tall enough. So the first exercise just looks like this. It's a wall slide. You may have seen me talk about it before, but we're going to add in a twist. Okay, first we want to stand with our body as close to the wall as possible. Arms like this, hands back, and then we go up, and then we go down,

[01:38] boo, keeping the back of our hands to the wall. Here's a full body view. When we go up, there's a tendency to want to arch our lower back like this. Try to resist that, tuck in your abs and go up like this.

[01:52] A slightly easier variation is to do it with your feet out, or just sitting down like this. No matter how you do it, the twist is when you come back down to squeeze your arms back like this, hold for a moment, feel it in your back before going back up.

[02:04] This way you can get the benefits from wall slides and wall angels. The names are just to make it sound fancy and memorable, but perhaps the most important tip I can give for this exercise is that your form does not have to be as perfect as you think. It's a stretch, so even if your arms don't go all the way back, even if your belly does come up,

[02:19] even if your head can't reach all the way back. It's okay, just feel the stretch. You'll improve over time. And just try to stay out of the range that causes you pain. It is around 32 degrees, 34 degrees Fahrenheit, so I think we're going to go inside the field of the rest.

[02:32] This next exercise also has a twist, like twisting is literally involved. On both sides, it's the most of us use one side of our body more than the other, so we'll reach over and we'll grab something, or we'll reach down and we'll grab something else.

[02:45] So it makes sense, right, that we have these rotational imbalances. You might notice one side is a little bit or a lot of bit tighter than the other. And we can help solve this by stretching. Many of you know but leg up, over if you can, turn towards a raised leg and just hold for time.

[02:59] Around 30 seconds to a minute. Do the tight side first, then do the other side for an equal amount of time. And if you struggle with that, don't worry. You can do a slightly easier variation standing where you reach behind you and you touch the wall and hold for time.

[03:12] But make sure you do both sides. And just like with the previous exercise, if you can't get the exact form, if you can't get your leg over or you can't bend your leg, don't stress out too much, it's really about feeling and stretching the muscles.

[03:24] So as long as you're stretching the right muscles, it might look a lot different than what I'm showing, but still working. So while my stretch looks like this, yours might look like this, which is fine. And remember that while you will feel a stretch,

[03:37] you don't need to stretch yourself into areas of intense pain. You can scale back if you need to. I think the idea of perfect form during stretching really stresses some people out. Just start with what you can do and you'll improve over time. And the next exercise is just this,

[03:50] spending some time every day in your deepest squat. Whistling optional. Now in the deep squat, you might notice that our back tends to round a little bit like this,

[04:02] which might seem weird in a posture video where we're trying to stand up straight, except there are many times in our lives where we might not need to stand up straight, like working, studying, writing, reading, lots of things. But this while we don't want to be stuck hunched over, we might not also want to be stuck around rods straight all the time.

[04:16] It's good to have options and be comfortable in those options. So it only benefits us to practice being strong and mobile in this position. The deep squat is a very natural and useful human position. Now you might notice that your heels come up when you try to do this.

[04:28] Now don't worry if that happens, you can just... one sec.

[04:40] If you find a tree or something like it, you can use it to ease yourself down or you otherwise might fall back without it. But you can hold yourself forward and still gain the benefits from the exercise. And it's not strictly necessary for posture but you might find that eventually you can stand without it or squat without it.

[04:54] Yeah. If it borders you to simply hold the squat, you can move around in it, you can use your arms to assist and you can also stretch it a little bit like so. These are just some of the many exercises that could help your posture.

[05:07] I try to pick ones that help me personally. Ones that might not be as well known and ones people would actually do. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this can help. Let me know if you have any ideas. Have a wonderful, beautiful day, my friend.