How Exercising Can Help To Improve Your Posture
We live in a modern age where most people earn a living from a job where they sit all through. As you grow older, it takes a toll on your back and it becomes evident in your posture.
This is because the abdominal core gradually weakens and our posture becomes slouched instead of upright like it should be... are you already noticing this condition?
Why You Should Be Concerned About Maintain A Good Posture
For starters, a bad posture makes you shorter and fatter. While having a good posture does the opposite and it keeps your neck, head and back in alignment with each other which means you have a better centre of gravity.
This in turn ensures that you have a good upper and lower body balance so that you are steady on your feet and you have lesser chances of falling and getting injured.
Exercises That Can Improve Your Posture
If you are interested in improving your posture, you would have to do exercises that strength and tone the muscles in your abdominal core, lower back, thighs and buttocks. These muscle groups work together to support and counter balance each other evenly.
Exercises like yoga, Pilates and planks are target-specific as they stabilise and improve the muscles in the lower back and abdominal core. As for squats and lunges, they strengthen the buttocks and thighs so that the alignment in your hips is improved tremendously.
Strengthening Your Upper Body
Doing this improves your upper body balance. By strengthening your neck and upper back, you would be keeping the entire weight of your head in the centre of your spine (this is how it should be).
If you want strengthen your neck and upper back, you would have to engage in resistance exercises like backward resistance exercise and shoulder roll back exercises.
*Shoulder Roll Back Exercise*
To do this particular exercise, stand upright with your feet apart by about a shoulder width. Keeping your arms by your side, roll your shoulders down and back while squeezing your shoulder blades to each other. If you are performing this movement correctly, you hands would rotate outwards.
Now pull your chin towards your neck, but try not to bend your head forwards. Keep this posture for 30 seconds. Repeat this exercise thrice each day (morning, afternoon and night).
*Backward Resistance Exercise*
To do this exercise, put your hands behind your head and interlock your fingers. Your elbow should be pointing straight out. Now firmly push your hands forward while use your neck to create a resistance so that your head doesn’t move.
Keep this position for 10 seconds and make sure that the resistance is something you are feeling. Do three sets of this exercise and repeat it three times a day.
Strengthening Your Lower Body
Doing this would improve your lower body balance. Since your legs and feet are in charge of supporting the full weight of your body, it is obvious that strengthening them is important to giving you a good posture.
The popular exercises that strengthen the muscles in the quadriceps and calves are cycling, sprinting, jogging and skipping.
Less popular exercises include:
Standing calf raises: which you can perform on a step or small platform to strengthen your calves and improve the arches under your feet.
Leg extensions: You do this on weights machines
Squats/lunges: while you do with free weights (i.e. barbells, dumbbells and kettlebells). These exercises strengthen your quadriceps.
While doing leg extension, keep the weight under your perceived limit. And only start out with a maximum of 2 sets of 15 repetitions. You can always increase gradually as you become stronger. This is because it places a lot of tension on your knees.
Strengthening all your muscles that maintain body posture is not just important for appearance sake, the health benefit is that it reduces your risk of failing down (and getting seriously injured) because a muscle failed or you could not stabilise yourself when your feet hit an object on the ground.