Think there is nothing you can do to improve your posture?
Think again.
It turns out that there are numerous methods that you can use to improve the way that you stand and sit, making you feel dramatically more comfortable as a result.
Start With Back Exercises
Exercising your back doesn’t sound particularly inspiring, but it is essential if you want to maintain good form, especially as you get older. Strengthening the back muscles provides your spine with more support and can also make you more robust against injury.
Back workouts come in various forms. But the most effective are those that are moderately strenuous. You don’t necessarily need to aim for a personal best every time you hit the gym. But you do want to make sure that you exercise the muscles quite hard if you can. The more you can repeatedly challenge them; the hardier and more robust they will become.
Spend Less Time In Front Of Screens
Do you sometimes feel that you spend the majority of your life in front of a screen? If so, you’re not alone. The average person now has seven hours of screen time per day, and that number is rising all the time.
The reason for this is twofold: first off, we’ve never had jobs that were so cerebral before. Making money in the modern economy typically involves thinking with a computer’s help, not just doing some manual tasks with your hands. Your boss expects to communicate with you via email – and so do your colleagues. While you have the odd in-person meeting, you do most of your work sitting at a desk in front of a screen.
The second reason has to do with how we entertain ourselves. Screens allow us to consume content passively, instantly making them more attractive than going outside. Furthermore, they offer such a vast library of content, it is hard not to get addicted to them.
Speak With A Professional
If you think that you have a problem with your posture, you should speak with an expert, like Ryde Chiropractic, first. They will be able to tell you whether you have a genuine problem or what you should do next.
Adopt The Correct Sleeping Position
When it comes to your posture, how you sleep matters.
It turns out that long-term body alignment relates to the position in which we sleep. The best for your neck and back is back-sleeping, where your head faces the ceiling.
The reason for this comes down to basic anatomy. While sleeping on your side and front is okay for short periods, they tend to put more pressure on it. Front sleeping, for instance, places tension on the lumbar spine for many people. And side sleeping can have damaging knock-on effects on the neck.
Do Core Exercises
A lot of people have backs that are much stronger than their abdominals. While they regularly use their back muscles to pick themselves up, the use of their stomach muscles is much less frequent.
Core exercises, however, can help to correct this imbalance.
The most popular is the standard crunch, but this isn’t the only exercise that you can do. Others include the traditional leg raise, the plank, and oblique twists using the cable pulley at your gym.
If you don’t have anything other than a mat, then you can try a variety of exercises, like V-ups, side crunches, and leg crossovers.
In general, you want to hit your core muscles in multiple ways. Don’t just stick with the same basic core movements and do them over and over. That’s unlikely to make a difference in your physique. Instead, hit all the muscles in your abdominals from different angles and wait for the effects to take place. You’ll be surprised by how much progress you can make toward improving your posture in the space for a few short months.
Practice Sitting Up Properly
Since we spend so much of our lives in a sitting position, we all need to focus on how we sit.
If you currently hunch over your laptop while you work, you might want to rethink your seating position right now! When you speak to the experts at Aurum Health Care, you will find out exactly how you should be sitting. Practicing sitting up properly will ache for a while, but you will get used to it. Better to have an ache for a bit than a hunch, right?
The current advice here is to become more self-aware of how you sit. Your shoulders should be neutral and your back and neck straight – as if you were standing up. You want to avoid becoming hunched over, or any kind of stooping as this puts tremendous pressure on the top vertebrae of your spine and can even change their shape.
