The Prone Cobra
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Position 1
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Position 2
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To perform this exercise, first lie face down on a mat with your arms at your sides, palms facing in (Position 1). The first motion is to reach down along the sides of your body for your toes with your fingertips. This will effectively depress your shoulder girdle, meaning your shoulders will move down towards your hips. This motion is the opposite of a shoulder shrug. Once you have depressed your shoulders, raise your chest up off the floor while keeping your hips and feet pinned to the floor. This will extend your thoracic spine. Keep your chin down so that your spine stays straight. As you extend your spine, raising your chest up and continuing to reach down to your toes, depressing your shoulders, rotate your arms up away from the floor and squeeze your shoulder blades together (Position 2). . The idea with trying to rotate your arms up is not so much to turn your thumbs to the ceiling (that is the right direction) but to rotate from the shoulders really opening up the chest, squeezing your shoulder blades toegther. Breathe out as you move up from Position 1 to Position 2, and in as you move back down from Position 2 to Position 1.
When you reach full contraction (Position 2) with your chest up, spine extended, shoulders still depressed, and arms rotated up (point your elbow pits out away from your body) hold the contraction for a half second, then relax and repeat. Do 12-15 reps, 3-4 sets. This exercise can seem a little complicated, but just think of it as reversing the posture we tend to fall into when seated. In a chair we tend to let our shoulders slump, our arms turn in, our back slouch, and our head fall forward. In this exercise you throw your shoulders back and squeeze your shoulder blades together, extend your back, rotate your arms outwards, and keep your neck long and straight with your chin down.
Bent Reverse Fly
The bent reverse fly will strengthen and tone your rhomboids, rear deltoids, and middle trapezius, the three muscles primarily responsible for holding your shoulders back. This exercise is similar to the prone cobra, but is done standing. Unlike the other exercises we’ve gone over in this tutorial, this motion makes use of weight. Start out with very light weights - 2.5 or 5lbs dumbbells. If you don’t have access to weights you can do this exercise holding cans of juice.
To perform the bent reverse fly, start by bending at the waist untill your torso is nearly parallel to the ground. Hold light weights out near arm's length with your elbows slightly bent, and the weights in line with your chest in the horizontal plain. The weights should be about a foot below your chest in the vertical plain. Keep your spine straight, extending your upper back by pulling up your chest just as you do in the prone cobra (Position 1).
To begin the exercise, raise your arms up away from the floor, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Make sure that as you do this you don’t shrug your shoulders. Your shoulders should stay pressed down towards your hips throughout this motion. If you let your shoulders rise up in a shrug type motion towards your ears, you’ll end up using the wrong muscles to perform this exercise. Keeping your shoulders pressed towards your hips, move you arms as high away from the ground as possible, and squeeze your shoulder blades together as tightly as you can. When you reach the top of this motion (Position 2), hold for a half second, squeezing your shoulder blades together, then release and proceed back towards position one. Lower the weights down to the point where you no longer feel any resistance from gravity, then switch directions and proceed back up towards Position 2.
The key to doing this exercise correctly is to move from the shoulders blades. Think about moving your arms up and down solely by squeezing your shoulder blades together, and then letting your shoulder blades pull apart. Pull in your bellybutton, breathing out, as you move your arms up towards the ceiling. Breath deep into the stomach as you release your arms down towards the ground. Perform 2 or 3 sets of this exercise after you do the prone cobra. Choose weights that you can do for 10-15 reps.
Head and Neck Alignment
Neck Stretching
Neck stretching is critically important for posture and almost universally neglected in most people’s stretching routines. When your neck is properly aligned, your head and neck sit straight above your rib cage, and their weight is supported by your ribs and spine. Poor neck posture shifts the head forward. Since the head is so heavy, the upper spine, hips, and even lower body all have to alter their alignment when the weight of the head is shifted. Bad hip, spine, and lower body posture follow. In addition, poor neck posture contributes to headaches and neck and shoulder tension, and makes it more difficult to breathe properly. The Stretching Tutorial details three stretches for correcting head and neck alignment.
Summing Things Up
Exercising to correct posture and alignment can seem a little strange at first. Most of us hit the gym to lose weight and/or build muscle, and postural exercise might seem like a lot of work for something that doesn’t promise to shrink your waist or tone your abs. We like to think of corrective exercise as a long term investment in the health of your body. It may take a bit of effort in the beginning, but once you’ve improved your posture it doesn’t take much to keep it good. In addition good posture looks a lot better and improves performance in pretty much every sport.
Postural exercise is easily integrated into a normal training program. Just take 2 days a week for postural exercise (three if you're really ambitious), and reserve another three days for more traditional workouts.
Alternatively, tack our postural exercises onto the end of your normal workouts. They don’t require all that much energy, so it doesn’t matter too much if you’re already a bit fatigued when you get to them
if you're a novice exerciser, you'll actually be better off focusing mostly on postural exercise for a few months before getting into a great deal of more traiditonal lifting. It takes very little exercise to start the body down the road to getting fit (see Getting Started with Exercise). Just the four exercises listed in this program will begin to condition your body, paving the way to more tradiitonal fitness goals like fat loss and muscular development down the road. Combining two days per week of postural exercise with one or two days of light tradiitonal lifting is optimal for most beginers.
The two biggest mistakes beginning exercisers make are exercising too much and exercising the wrong muscles with improper form. Postural exercise is reasonably low intensity, so if 2 of your 3 or 4 workouts per week are postural, overtraining won't be a problem. In addiiton, postural exercise emphasizes form, and targets the muscles that are generally the most underdeveloped, helping you balance out your body before begining a more aggressive lifting regimen. This will go a long way towards preventing pain and injury. About 50% of people sustain an injury in their first 3 months in the gym. If everyone started off with postural exercise, this number would be a lot lower.
Your Postural Exercise Program
Your postural exercise program is simple. Just perform the four exercises outlined in this tutorial in the order given for the specified number of sets and reps:
Low Ab Hold, Hip Loader, Prone Cobra, Bent Reverse Fly
The rest of the program is all stretching. The stretches recommended in this program can be performed any time, although they will be most effective when you're warm - say after a cardio session. If you can, run through the whole stretching tutorial 3-5 times per week. If you don’t have time to run through all of the stretches after your workouts (when you're warm and will get the most out of them), choose the ones that seem to target your tightest muscles. Also, try to build time for stretching into your day. A quick active stretch is a great way to get the blood flowing in the morning or wake up after a boring class or meeting. Stretching can also be a good way to wind down and relax at the end of the day.
Make postural exercise a priority, and in 8-10 weeks your body will feel better, work better, and look better. Pretty much everyone's body can benefit from postural exercise. Whether your goal is looking better, feeling better, avoiding pain and injury, or improving performance, good posture is critical. Postural exercise is a simple, effective path to better posture, and should form a pillar of everyone's exercise routine.
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