Author: Kara Leung, Bayview Personal Trainer
Unless you have impeccable posture, you’re probably slumped over.
What doesn’t help the issue is that Canadian adults spend three-quarters of their waking hours sitting or reclining! Imagine the hours you’ve spent at a desk, starting from when you were a student, to working in the office and even thanks to Toronto traffic some of us sit for hours in commute.
“Sit up straight”, your mom says, but it’s more than likely that it takes too much conscious effort and energy to bring your shoulders back. This is a result of two things: a tight chest and front of the shoulders, and a weak upper back.
So what can you do to correct your posture and bring sexy back?
1) Stretch and release that chest and shoulders! Stretching allows the muscles on the front of the body to relax rather than contributing to excessive forward rotation of the shoulders. If you’re not sure how to stretch click here for an easy way to loosen up using just a doorway.
2) Do more back exercises to strengthen the muscles that keep you upright and in proper alignment. Any pulling movement will do such as the cable row, lat pulldown, one-armed row, barbell row, dumbbell row. Rows are a wonderful way to correct this posture so row, row, row. Here’s an example of a great rowing exercise you can do using the cable:
3) Remember to focus on a 2:1 ratio of back to chest so that you don’t make the front of your body more tense but rather strengthen those postural muscles on your back half. I never said you can’t do a push-up ever again, as long as you do more back exercises.
These 3 simple changes can help you straighten up and bring sexy back! Get to it!
