I can see how all of these can be, if not corrected, not only look bad, you know, from the outside, but also get worse over time. Definitely resistance training can be a big part of improving posture. It’s really amazing what can change quickly when you start addressing these areas. Welcome to the Strength Changes everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well being. I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios.

My co hosts are Brian Sagan, co founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Today’s episode is going to be a QA episode where we’re going to answer the question what exercises are best for posture? So, when you think about good Posture versus bad posture, some images may come to your mind about what poor posture looks like and what good posture looks like. So I think let’s start answering this question by breaking down what are the most common types of bad posture out there that people may have and what causes those. And then we’ll talk about what we can do about that in terms of exercise and how that may benefit or possibly correct some of these things. So we’re going to dive in first to the Good posture versus bad posture, most common culprits.

So Dr. Fisher, tell us a little bit about what are the most common types of poor posture that people have and what are the causes of that? Yeah, so when we think of posture, we typically think of our spinal curvature. And our spine has four natural curves. So our cervical curve, the spine of our neck, is a slight lordosis, it’s a slight curve back. We have our thoracic curve which is typically our ribcage and our upper torso and that’s a slight curve forward. And then we have our lumbar curve Which is again a slight curve back. And I’ve put an image on the screen there. And the left hand side of that image, you can see cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and our pelvic curvature as well. And that’s good posture. That’s how our spine should be aligned, what I call neutral alignment. It’s kind of all in place. And of course, that’s dependent upon muscles holding the spine in place. Now, on the right hand side of that image, we can also see a kyphotic posture. And their kyphosis can be. To see a kyphotic posture, and the kyphosis can be one of the issues. So, we can actually get a cervical kyphosis where effectively our chin juts forward.

So, a good way to think of this is our chin should actually be in line with our clavicle. And I’m kind of doing this with my hands. So, if you’re watching on YouTube and you’re wondering, that’s exactly what I’m trying to imitate. Our chin should be in line with our clavicle, but partly because we lean forward to look at screens, or we even look down to look at tablets and mobile phones, dare I say it, and cell phones, we create this kind of kyphosis where our head juts forward and even kind of starts to lean forward.

And I think I’ve got an image up on the screen now. So we can see that the very right hand of those images is a normal lordosis. And you can see the image, I mean, these are all straight off Google images, So forgive me sharing a face, but they’ve put it on Google anyway. You can see that there is in line effectively with their clavicle. You can’t quite see their clavicle, but you can kind of see it clearly. You can gauge where it is. And then there’s a slight lean forward with the middle image and then a kyphosis with the very left hand image where their head is really jutted forward. And that’s called a cervical kyphosis. I’m going to jump back an image. Because the next, the first image that we showed is a really nice one to show a thoracic kyphosis. So our thoracic spine already curves in that way and it’s even easier to start to curve.

And what we often see is rounding of the shoulders and our chest effectively start to hollow forward. And again, we spend a lot of time at a desk or a keyboard and our arms are in front of us, our pectoral muscles tighten in front of us and they cause our shoulders to round and pull our thoracic spine forward into that thoracic curvature. Yeah, there we go. So, the middle image there is a kyphosis, and we can see exactly what’s happening with the spine there. And then we have two further issues one is a more exaggerated lordosis, and one is an anterior pelvic tilt.

And they often kind of go hand in hand. And I’m going to skip ahead and talk about the anterior pelvic tilt first because we can already see it in that image. But we can see even more so in this image. And effectively, what’s happening is our Hip flexor muscles, which go from our thigh, from our quadricep muscles and attach to the top of our pelvis, they become shortened from being in a seated position, whether that’s at a desk, in a car, on a bus, on a plane, wherever it might be, on a couch. We all spend probably more time than we should in a seated position. And because of that, those hip flexor muscles become shortened, they become tighter, and then when we stand up they pull our pelvis forward and down at the front. Now because they’re doing that, our body’s natural solution kind of body’s natural solution to keep our center of mass over our base of support, to kind of keep our balance, is that we exaggerate our lumbar curve, which is a lordosis. And that’s more evident in this image, in the very right hand side of this image. So we can see that really extreme lumbar curve.

Now, it’s worth clarifying not only do none of those things look ideal, they can really show either us to look potentially like we have more adipose tissue than we’d like. Certainly, the anterior pelvic tilt, if we show that again, makes our stomach protrude a little bit. So, it might make us look a bit like, dare I say, a little bit fatter than we actually are, like we’re carrying more abdominal fat. But it’s also not healthy. It’s not healthy for our spine. It’s putting extra stress on certain parts of our spine. If we can imagine our head jutted forward, that mass of our head is applying force in a different position in the vertebrae of our cervical and thoracic spine. Which is not good for long term health. Okay. So basically, the main two areas that you just described where people have issues, the kyphosis the cervical one where our chin comes forward, where we look down often and we can kind of over time with bad habits, with what we’re doing, basically, you know. Have a situation where our chin is kind of like protruding past our clavicle and it’s unhealthy and it’s like a forward movement of our chin and our head and our neck.

But then the kyphosis of the, it’s like a hunchback is what I, Picture where you start to see that extreme protrusion behind the shoulder blades because of the tight pectorals and the weaker back muscles. They’re not upright and pulling backwards how they should. And then with the anterior pelvic tilt, what you’re talking about, I’ve seen this too, where, yeah, it’s kind of like an angled stance. Your low back kind of angles in way more than it should due to tight hip flexors, weak glutes, weak abdominals. And then The abdominal area protrudes more toward the front because of the arching of the low back, right? So I can see how all of these can be, if not corrected, not only look bad from the outside, but also get worse over time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. So then what can we do about this in terms of exercise?

And what are the best things we can do to sort of Make corrections to some of these things? Yeah, well, first off, I love. That we’ve had this question from a listener because I love the idea that people are actively thinking not just about the obvious benefits of strength training being stronger and building muscle mass, but the additional benefits that go along with that, like improving posture and all the health benefits that we talk about. And definitely resistance training can be a big part of improving posture. Most of it looks at what we would call the posterior chain. So the posterior chain is basically the muscles of our posterior. We’re very anterior dominant animals. So we do everything in front of us. Of course, we do everything in front of us because that’s where we work. That’s where our eyes are and our faces and so on and so forth.

But it means that the muscles of our back are often neglected to some extent. So resistance training that focuses on our posterior muscles, whether that’s our hamstrings, our gluteals, our Erector spinae, and our lower back muscles, and then our mid and upper back muscles, and even our posterior deltoids, are the key ones that are going to correct our posture. So, if we think about that in terms of performing exercise, certainly at the exercise coach, a leg press is absolutely key. We want to strength train our gluteal muscles because they’re going to be a key part of combating tight hip flexors. We strength train our glutes, strong glutes combat tight hip flexors. And our hamstrings to some extent there. As well. We can also strength train our hamstrings using the Crossfire as just a wonderful machine to train our hamstrings, but we can train our low back on the nucleus and our abdominals on the nucleus as well with abdominal flexion and trunk extension. And then, of course, we can train our upper back, our rhombus, our trapezius, which sit between our scapula, between our shoulder blades This is served to pull our shoulder blades back as well as our posterior deltoids and our lats, which also serve to kind of stabilize and hold our scapula In place, and that prevents that kyphosis.

So there’s just a handful of exercises there which really serve a wonderful job in preventing postural decline or correcting poor postreph. Yeah, there’s a lot there, and I think that it’s a good point to make, like how often neglected the posterior muscle is muscles are in our body. And I always think about, you know Hamstrings injuries being the number one injury in sports. You know, why is that? It’s because our quads are often so strong. You know, if you’re running a sprint on a track and you use sprint and your quads are really firing and you’re working hard with the, you know, carrying you forward and then you have to quickly stop or pull yourself back using your hamstring. And they’re so much weaker than the quad. I mean, you can see how they can easily tear. They can easily, they’re weak and tight often. And so, exercise that lengthens and strengthens those muscles in particular can be so amazing. Even on the crossfire, anecdotally, it’s really fun because sometimes we will. So, that’s training hamstrings and hip flexors primarily one leg at a time, where you’re able to contract. And pull your hamstring back and then lengthen it under a load that really lengthens and strengthens that hamstring muscle all at the same time.

And oftentimes we will see people try to touch their toes before using that the crossfire and they won’t make it too far past their knees and then they’ll do a set on the crossfire, both legs, lengthening that hamstring under a load, both legs, and by the end they can touch their toes. So it’s really amazing what can change quickly and then over course, longer term in the body when you start addressing these areas. The other point you made too about exercising on the nucleus, the back and the abs, I do think it’s Pretty common. What do you say to this?

Do you find that a lot of people out there believe that it really is an abdominal issue if you have an arch in your low back? They want to tighten up the front of their abdominals by focusing on situps or crunches or abdominal exercise, but maybe a lot of people I don’t think think about their low back as being just as important, if not more so, in being upright? Have you found that? Yeah, so I think that when we think about people with low back issues or people with a greater lordosis, some exaggerated lordosis, oftentimes they will stretch their low back rather than strengthen their low back, but they might actually do abdominal strengthening work. So, and I read, you know, this is not an original concept. It was taught to me years and years back, but the working our way upwards, we have some joints that are designed for mobility and some joints that are designed for stability.

And our ankles should be mobile, our knees should be stable, our hips should be mobile, our low back should be stable. And in fact, and so I think in that sense, too much mobility in our low back can allow that exaggerated kyphosis. And what we want is a strong and stable spine rather than a hypermobile spine where we can fall into poor posture. And some of that can be exaggerated by stretching of the spine and strengthening of other muscles rather than strengthening of the low back itself. I know you had a nice analogy beforehand related to the muscles of the trunk. Yes, I saw this clip recently somewhere online where it talked about like picture your core and we’d done a whole episode about the core before basically being picture it as a container, a box or like a cylinder like with a top and a bottom and sides.

The top is your diaphragm. The front is your abdominals and sides being your obliques. And then the back is your back muscles and your spinal muscles. And then the bottom is the pelvic floor. Picture it as a whole unit and picture it being upright. You have to pay attention to all the sides of it to kind of remember to hold it upright to improve your posture. And so I don’t know if that helps you, but if you picture it as a unit in your Body, I think it helps me to pay more attention to basically those components and think of them as one unit. I really like that analogy. And I think if we go back to the image on the screen for a second, then we can see that the left hand image, where we’ve got what we would consider good posture, we can see that that cylinder is upright, it’s contained, it’s in place.

And all of those muscles are acting equally to hold it in place. Whereas the image on the right, where there’s poor posture, the weak abdominals. Or the laxity in the low back and the anterior pelvic tilt are allowing that container to not be completely vertical. And I think this is something that we should also clarify with regards to any strength training. So all strength training should be done with good posture. And this is, of course, one of the benefits of supervised strength training that even if you’re on an overhead press or a pull down or you’re on a chest press, which aren’t key exercises that we’ve necessarily talked about, they would still be done with good posture. And what I typically say, and I believe the coaches say as well, is we want an active core or an active trunk. So we don’t sit down and switch everything off.

We sit down and we keep those muscles active, even though they’re not the target muscles that we’re exercising in a specific movement like a chest press or an overhead press. Really good points. One other thing I just thought of too while you were talking, and then I’m going to ask you if there’s any other factors we should consider too related to our muscle health with posture. But I think it was with an interview a while back, and I forget who we were talking about this with on the podcast, but basically, it’s the idea that people like to train the muscles that they can quickly see or easily see.

Do you remember this conversation? I do. It was Matt Brisky. Matt Brisky, where, again, thinking about the body and thinking about many times how we can neglect some of those, the back and the hamstring muscles. You know, they’re not like super visible, they’re not super glamorous, but think about how important they are. So if we focus all of our attention, you know, on our pectorals and our quads, that’s fine, but it could make our postural issues worse over time and exacerbate other things. And so it’s a good kind of cautionary thing, like let’s just, let’s make sure we pay attention to our whole body, you know, as we strength train and not hyperfocus maybe on a couple muscle groups. Because of this exact point. You know, you’re 100 accurate, Amy. Well done. That’s a great point. Okay. So, then aside from, you know, strength training, what anything else we should keep in mind then with this about improving our posture or preventing poor posture over time?

Yeah. So, the other thing that we can do to correct posture or to improve posture and retain good posture is stretching. And this is, I think, really important because this is something that a lot of exercise coach studios now offer. We were recently at the annual conference, the annual franchise conference, and I knew I was going to spend a prolonged period sitting down. I actually went to one of our colleagues, Kevin McKee, and I got him to do some stretches with me. And one of the key stretches that I was interested in was a hip flexor stretch. And that’s because I knew I was going to spend so long sitting down that I wanted at some point to lengthen my hip flexor muscles because I didn’t want them to be causing me even just an acute anterior pelvic tilt. He also stretched out my calf muscles as well and it was fantastic. But I think this is really important that there are muscles that we can strengthen and we can train to improve our posture and we will definitely see chronic benefits or longerterm benefits by doing that. But we can also stretch some muscles and we will see an acute benefit So if we acutely stretch our pectoral muscles, our pectoral Minor predominantly, or our hip flexor muscles, then actually we can see a really immediate improvement in our posture.

You know, you just mentioned hamstrings a moment ago and said that people can get much closer to touching their toes by lengthening their hamstrings under force, under tension. And so we see this acute benefit of stretching or of lengthening a muscle and it can really improve our posture for the rest of the day. And of course, the better our posture is during the day, the more likely we are to carry that forward. Having bad posture Is only going to lead to worse posture in the long term. So, yeah, so I think it’s worth clarifying that there are some things, there are some ways to improve posture that might include things like stretching.

If you’re a visual person, one way to explain this too is if you picture a t shirt sitting on a bed, just a plain t shirt, nobody’s wearing a t shirt, and you take your fingers like a claw and you grab the t shirt and you twist it, into a knot, what’s going to happen to that t shirt? It’s going to come in, it’s going to gather in, it’s going to shorten and tighten and become smaller everywhere else because you’re knotting it up in the middle. And that’s a really good analogy to me about what happens when you have a tight muscle that’s knotted up and not lengthened all the way and not stretched, it’s tightened up. So it’s pulling everything in towards itself, which you can see immediately. Like if you picture at the chest or the pectorals Being super tight, what’s going to happen to your shoulders? You’re going to hunch forward and it’s all connected that way. Right. And so, stretching that area out can release that tension and that tightness and those knots to enable you then to have better posture because it’s not fighting against the posture because of how tight it is.

So, I don’t know if that helps you, but that’s exactly a huge point, Dr. Fishinger. I’m glad you made the point about. Paying attention to the Basically the length of our muscles and how tight they may be when it comes to this, and not neglect that either and just focus only on strength training and kind of, you know, trying to sit more upright at home and things like that. Stretching is a huge piece of it, especially with those problematic areas. Well, thank you so much for breaking this down today for us. And again, if this question or these QA episodes are beneficial or they spark other questions that you have, please visit us at strengthchangescom and submit your question for the show. We would love to address it in a future episode. We will see you next week on the podcast. And until then, we hope you remember strength changes everything.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverythingcom Join us next week for another episode and be sure to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.