Once you’ve got the hang of alternately arching and then flattening out your back, switch the position of your thumbs. Keeping your fingers on your hip bones, move your thumbs up to your rib cage directly above your hip bones.

Arch your back again (Position 1 below), and then flatten it out (Position 2 below). Notice how your thumbs and pointer fingers get closer as you flatten your back by curling your pelvis under you and move further away as you arch your back by tipping your pelvis forward?

Position 1	Position 2

With your finger on your hip bones and your thumbs on your rib cage, your hand is lying over top of your abdominus rectus muscle (the six pack muscle) and is actually mimicking the motion of that muscle. Your ab rectus runs from your rib cage down to your pelvis. When you contract your ab rectus, your rib cage moves down towards your pelvis, flattening out your back. When you stretch your ab rectus, your rib cage moves up away from your pelvis, arching your back. With your fingers on your hip bones and thumbs on your rib cage, the distance between your fingers and thumbs as you flatten and then arch your back mirrors the length of your ab rectus muscle during these movements. In this way, you can see that a short ab rectus muscle (fingers close to thumbs) correlates with a flat back and a long ab rectus muscle (fingers far away from thumbs) correlates with an overly arched back

Sitting 10 hours a day every day can begin to shorten your abdominus rectus muscle. This has the same postural effect as bringing your fingers and thumbs close together with your fingers on your hip bones and your thumbs on your rib cage. It brings your rib cage down towards your hips, flattening out your lower back and eliminating the arch that is supposed to be there. Ultimately, loss of this arch can lead to back pain.

Every muscle in the body can affects the alignment of the joint(s) it attaches to in the same way that the abs affect the alignment of the hips and spine . As a result, changes in the length and tension of different muscles can have a dramatic impact on the alignment of joints. We’ve already discussed how proper joint alignment is critical to joint health. Good posture is nothing but the proper alignment of all of your major joints. Davis’s law explains how something as simple as spending a large portion of the day seated can lead to changes in the length and tension of various muscles, ultimately resulting in poor posture and increased stress to joints.Postural Exercise

To sum things up, sitting through most of the day changes the length and tension of muscles, which alters the alignment of joints, compromising joint health and ruining posture. So how do you reverse these changes? It’s really pretty simple. All you have to do is identify which muscles tend to get short and tight and which tend to get long and loose, and then stretch out the short tight muscles and strengthen and shorten the long loose muscles. It may sound too good to be true, but a few simple exercises and stretches can do wonders for your posture and even help reduce knee, hip, and back pain.

Postural Exercise

The art of correcting alignment and posture through stretching and targeted resistance training is called “postural exercise”. Many good gyms now have a postural exercise specialist on staff. Good chiropractors and physical therapists employ postural exercise as well. Working with a skilled professional is great, but if that isn’t an option, try the exercises in this tutorial. We provide exercises and stretches to help correct the alignment of every major joint in the body, starting with the ankles and knees and moving all the way up to the neck.

Stretching constitutes the biggest part of postural exercise. The major stretches you need to improve your posture are covered in our Stretching Tutorial. We detail below which stretches will help with the alignment of which joints. The resistance training exercises you’ll need are outlined in detail below. Follow this program in order to successively target all of the major joints in your body.

Don’t Sabotage Your Posture in the Gym

Before we get to our postural exercise program, we need to cover the ways in which certain popular exercises affect alignment and posture. In general working a given muscle will tend to make that muscle tighter. The pecs, abs, and upper traps are three of the most commonly worked muscles in the gym - especially by anyone interested in gaining size. These are also three of the muscle groups that tend to get short and tight. Most people’s posture is compromised by short abs, pecs and traps to begin with. This tightness is then easily exacerbated by working these muscles through a shortened range of motion in the gym.

Muscles adapt to the way we work them out. To avoid shortening already overly short muscles it’s critical to work them through a full range of motion. Accordingly, avoid abdominal exercises like crunches and sit ups on benches or the floor (the corrective exercise we describe below is an exception since it stabilizes the arch in your lower spine) and work abs on the ball, extending back over the ball fully with each rep. Avoid machine chest presses and flys, and work out your pecs through the full range of motion using cables and dumbbells. Substitute a ball for the bench for dumbbell chest presses and flys since the ball leaves your shoulder blades free to move during your lifts. Avoid exercises like shoulder shrugs that target the upper traps entirely. Tight upper traps are horrible for posture, and unless you’re a football player or body builder, huge upper traps don’t do much for you.

The ReEvolution Posture and Alignment Program

This program targets all of the major joints in the body, starting at the ankle and working up to the neck. It includes both stretches and resistance exercises to correct muscle imbalances and improve alignment and posture. All of the stretches in this program are explained in detail in our Stretching Tutorial. The resistance exercises are described here. Notes on how,  when and in in what order to do these exercise are included at the end.

Ankle and Knee Alignment

Calf Stretching

Calf flexibility is critical to proper alignment of both the ankle and the knee. The actual mechanics of how different patterns of tightness in the calf affect these joints are a bit complicated. Fortunately we don’t need to understand these mechanics to engineer better alignment through exercise. Our Stretching Tutorial covers everything you need to know on calf stretching.

Quad Stretching

The flexibility of the quadriceps (the muscles of the thigh) have a major impact on the alignment of both the knee and the hip. Flexible quads lead to a more functional, high performance, injury proof body, and do wonders for posture. The Stretching Tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to improving quad flexibility.

Hip and Spine Alignment

Lower Ab Hold

Improving hip alignment usually depends as much on strengthening weak muscles as it does on stretching tight muscles. The most important muscle to strengthen as far as the hips are concerned is the abdominus rectus – specifically the lower part of the muscle. The lower ab hold is designed to do this.
The most important thing to do when training your lower abs with this exercise is to make sure your hips and spine are properly aligned during the exercise. The idea behind this exercise isn’t just to strengthen your lower abs – it’s to train your abs to hold your hips at the right angle. This won’t happen if you’re out of alignment during the exercise. When the hips and spine are aligned properly, the lower back is slightly arched.  The depth of this arch should be about equal to the thickness of your hand at the knuckles.

Start this exercise by lying flat on your back on a mat with your feet drawn up against your body:

Take a small towel and roll it up to create a lumbar support equal to the thickness of your hand at the knuckles. Make sure to compress the towel roll before measuring it against your hand. Slide the towel roll under your lower back at the levels of your belly button. Your belly button is at the same level as your third lumbar vertebrae, which is the apex of your lumbar curve.