0009: Think About Posture!

SUMMARY

Posture posture posture! We hear it all the time, everywhere we go. Don't slouch, open your chest, etc.

In this week's episode, Mike examines the topic of posture through the lens of a Personal Trainer. How do we (members of the fitness community) relate posture to movement? What else within the fitness dimension can posture affect or more importantly, enhance?

In a normal and healthy spine, there are two anterior curves, but labeled as three separate regions. Starting from the head down, is the cervical curve, thoracic curve, and finally the lumbar curve. Studies have revealed that these curves are what allows us to move and transfer amazing loads between the upper and lower limbs. If humans had a perfectly straight spine, we wouldn't be able to squat/jump as effectively, or even bend with load or efficiency, or complete any of the 7 primal movements as effectively.

Correct posture is important for many reasons, leading with the quality of your spine. If poor posture is present, the person will experience spine discomfort, pain, or injury, which is catastrophic to the quality of life.

Check out the whole video to learn how proper posture will enhance everything to everything, including breathing, blood circulation, healing, and essentially life itself.

OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Mike DeMora, and in today's lecture we're going to go over posture. So what is this thing called posture? What do we talk about when we talk about posture? So posture is the way you normally hold yourself. So posture can be, you know, stiff and whatever all this is my posture. Well, it probably really isn't. Posture is the way you normally hold yourself without thinking about it. So if you were to just forget about what you're doing and stop well, that's pretty much what your posture is. So when we talk about posture in training, we want to try to really protect the spine. So as we spoken in some of the other lectures, the spine has these curves in it, and we want to try to keep those curves, natural and, and part of the body, depending what are you doing? Whether you're standing there, whether you're moving, whether you're going through the thing.

So often times posture is looked at as form. So we have posture, even when we do an exercise or we have form when we do an exercise. So quite often someone will go to do a bench press or something like that. And they'll completely lose their posture. Their back will be all rounded and all, and it opens up themselves for injury. So when we talk about posture, we're really looking for the natural curves and looking for them to be in good position. So we have starting position, right? And then we have any type of movement. And then we have at the end, they should be back in the same spot. So for most of our practical application, what we do is we use a stick and you'll see in the next video, how we put a stick on their spine. We look at the different curves in their spine, and we judge them as they move to make sure that they stay in good position and that's really what it is.

When we look at posture, we look at so many different muscles involved. Our muscles are stabilizer muscles, our muscles that hold our body erect and hold our body in the right spot. All need to be trained, and think about there are hundreds of little tiny muscles that you don't know about or that you haven't heard about or that you don't talk about because they're not on the big placards when you do your big exercises and you know, you work on your bicep, but you don't think, wow, there's about a hundred little muscles that go off putting down the spine that are gonna stabilize me and make sure that I have what good posture or good form. And that's what we talk about when we talk about posture. So in our classes, it is key. It is so, so, so important! Form is everything.

We don't care about the load. We don't care about anything else other than the form, right? The form has to stay consistent no matter what the speed, no matter what the intensity, no matter what it is that they're doing. Better form over and over and over again, creates a habit. That habit becomes what, becomes their new posture or their new form. That's our goal. So posture training is one of those things where you can work so many different muscles. In fact, when you're doing a lot of stabilization training and you're doing a lot of the posture training, people will start sweating and you're like, wow, what are you sweating for? Well, if they normally hold themselves, all, you know, they're overdoing typing in, they're leaning over the key pad and they're right here. And then you just have them just work on their posture and say, okay, I want you to stand up straight, put your chest out. All those things that you've always been told shoulders back and down and what have you blabla, I just want you to hold that. Okay, now we're going to walk in place or we're going to do this, we're going to do on a treadmill. We're going to keep that posture.

You'll see people just start sweating because there's so many different muscles involved. Now remember, every time a muscle contracts, it has to do what? It has to use energy. And every time you use energy, energy inside of our bodies is in a form of a calorie, you know. We don't even like to get into that whole calorie thing, but just understand how many calories you burn or how much energy you are putting forth just to hold good posture, right. Just to keep yourself in good form. And that's kind of the whole philosophy.

That's that hidden, hidden secret that we always talk about, that people can start losing weight. So just think about during the whole day, if they've just kept themselves in good posture, rather than slumping over, think of how much more energy it's going to take them, they get to the end of the day, like, Oh my gosh, I need water. I need, I need food. I'm hungry, because all these muscles are contracting all the time. Now the flip side is that is once you have good posture and once that becomes your normal position, now it doesn't take energy at all because it's your normal resting position and nothing's out of place. But it keeps you safer and stronger and able to do much more. And when it comes to movement skills and anything else that you're going to do. Okay, well that's pretty much what we wanted to talk about today for posture really, really, really high on the priority. I mean, top five, for sure. Sure. If not even top three postures really important for the overall balance. So, Alrighty, we'll see you in the next video. Take care. Bye-bye.