there's a good chance that whilst you're watching this video your head will be tilted forward
slightly and your neck will be pushing forward as well and that's what's commonly referred
to as forward head posture and in this video i'm going to be talking about how that can impact your
hiking and climbing both the performance and your enjoyment of it and on top of that i'll be sharing
a little daily routine of exercises that you can implement to fix the problem let's get into it
so welcome or welcome back to the channel my name is chase i'm a strength and conditioning coach
with a keen interest in hiking and climbing and recently i've been particularly interested in long
distance hiking and how it affects the body the idea for this video came about while i was editing
footage and i noticed that in a lot of the shots i had this really horrific forward head posture and
it was terrible to look at so when i got home from the hike i decided i needed to do something about
it and that's how this video began and there's a lot of good reasons to identify and rectify this
posture aside from the fact that it just doesn't look very nice it's also known to have a negative
effect on our physical and mental health the link between posture and mental well-being now
is pretty well documented one of the key studies was the amy cuddy study which has been refuted and
then re-studied a number of times but if you're interested you can look into that in terms of how
posture affects our performance unfortunately this isn't something that's studied very heavily but i
have a hunch that the two are heavily intertwined and one interesting statistic i found was that
forward head posture can limit our lung capacity by up to 30 in some of the worst cases so you can
imagine how that could affect both hiking and especially climbing if you're at altitude but
one of the main reasons why i really decided to focus a lot of my own training around improving
my own posture after this trip was because of the potential that it has to create other injuries in
the body you might not think that the position of your head has a lot to do with how you hike but it
really does the body is designed to compensate for everything we're really just a series of links in
a chain and when one thing moves forward we need something else to counterbalance us so an injury
to your calf muscle for example could actually be caused by the forward head posture so hopefully
that's enough to convince you that something like this is worth rectifying and putting in a little
bit of time on a daily basis to improve upon so what can we actually do about it when the first
thing is just simply to be aware of it now this is a difficult thing to do often when we look to the
side of ourselves in the mirror we automatically adjust or it's just really difficult to see our
own posture so a lot of the time people don't notice that they have poor cervical posture until
they see a photo of themselves so that's the first thing you need to be aware of it i would recommend
getting a friend to take a photo of you from the side and just checking to see
where your ear line is if you have good posture it should pretty much line up with your shoulder if
it's forward of the shoulder then you've probably got a bit of forward head posture happening but
it's not the end of the world this is a long-term game and it's something that i've been through a
number of times now and each time i've managed to fix it and we're going to get into the exercises
shortly but the second thing you can do is to not strengthen that position unknowingly if you're in
the gym you're working out then it's likely that a lot of the tight muscles in the front of your neck
are probably engaging as you're doing pushing exercises for example like a bench press and if
you're noticing that your chin is going forward you need to rectify that by pulling it backwards
that's something that we'll talk about later and and also other exercises like rose again
filming yourself is a great way to keep an eye on your form and if you find that your chin is going
forward that's only going to be strengthening these muscles and making the situation worse so
whilst rose is a great example of something that we can do to strengthen our back and improve our
posture it's very important to be aware of what's going on with the neck whilst we're doing that
exercise so from all the time that we're spending either sitting at a desk working or looking at our
phone with our head down these muscles here at the front of the neck tend to get really tight
and overactive so the first thing we're going to do is stretch those muscles all right i'm going to
whip my shirt off here so you can see the muscles that we're actually trying to get at so the first
culprit is the scm sternocleidomastoid there's a big muscle that runs down the side of our
neck here you can see that as i turn my head it's really quite prominent begins just behind the ear
and inserts down into the sternum and the collarbone so keeping the shoulders down
is important to get a full range stretch here so first thing we're going to do is rotate the head
to the opposite side of which you're stretching and then we begin to lift the chin until you feel
the stretch now you should be able to see by now and i could feel it that this muscle
is quite tight and we're going to hold for 30 seconds you don't want it to be painful
obviously you need to be able to relax one of the key things with stretching
is being able to breathe and being able to relax and signal to the body to release so if you're
tense and you're tight while you're stretching you're not going to be getting the benefit you're
probably going to be making things worse so only go as far as you can in a very relaxed state being
able to breathe you might find that immediately as soon as you go into this stretch that you you
find that you are taking shallow breaths and you're not able to fully expand your rib cage
so only go as far as you can breathing slowly and deeply and being relaxed
holding for 30 seconds and then we can switch to the other side the second muscle in the neck that
we're going to hit is the anterior scalene so the anterior scalene can be found just here in
this little soft pocket above the collarbone it is really quite deep within the neck so it's a tough
one to get to so in order to stretch that we do the same thing depressing the shoulder by placing
your hand on the chest here and just pulling down slightly now last time we rotated first then we
looked up this times a little bit different we're going to bring the ear this ear to this shoulder
to stretch that side first before lifting the chin and looking up so to stretch anterior scalene ear
to shoulder slowly look up and we're looking you might have to just change the angle a little bit
we're looking to find a stretch here of the muscle that runs into this little soft exposed gap here
just above the collarbone so initially you can make some small changes by rotating the chin
around up and down to find the ideal spot but once you've found it you want to hold that position
don't change it for 30 seconds again breathe deeply try and stay relaxed hold for 30 seconds
and then take a break and come back in if you can't hold for 30 seconds just begin with 15
seconds if the situation is really bad likely you'll only be able to hold for 10 seconds
that's okay everyone's going to start somewhere expand it over time generally i'll do these first
thing in the morning when i'm really focused on making this a priority i'll do it again at lunch
and then i'll do it just before i go to bed i think bang for buck these are probably the two
most important exercises out of this routine but there's two more that are also really crucial we
also need a strengthening element which is what the next exercise is and this is a really simple
one that you'll see in just about every video for forward head posture and it's chin tucks
so pretty self-explanatory really all we're going to be doing is doing reps of tucking the
chin first before you do it try and establish a good posture because we're trying to teach
the body to be strong in the position that is ideal for our posture so when you start out
you might find that your natural position is here so first sit up nice and tall roll the shoulders
back and down try and lock the scapula down and then we'll be doing repetitions up to 30 of just
pulling the neck in it's important with this exercise and any exercise you do especially with
your neck is that you only train within a range of motion that you can without experiencing pain
so if you are getting any sharp pains back off a bit only work within a pain-free range of motion
if you are going to be successful at improving your posture then it is going to take that
consistent gentle nudge of doing these exercises quite frequently and i'll actually sit here whilst
i'm editing or i'll take a quick break and i'll just do these stretches and exercises
and one thing that i'm in a habit of doing it's almost unconscious now is when i'm at a desk i'm
quite often opening my shoulders really trying to pull back leading with the thumb tucking my chin
and just getting a stretch through the pec minor and stretching the front of the shoulder
and that's another little thing that you can add into this routine that is going to combat
that rounded forward shoulder position commonly called up across syndrome and it's very common
especially for people that work at a desk you know there's something deeply satisfying
about walking long distances and i think that that's been ingrained within us over a really
long period of time the problem that modern humans are facing is that we have devices and computers
that we're spending a lot of time looking at so as good as walking can be we really need to do
some preparation work to undo and to rectify some of these muscle imbalances that
really can become causes of injury over a long period of time you know walking is something that
can certainly help our posture it can improve our health and our well-being in general but it can
also exacerbate issues that are already there so if you do notice that you have rounded shoulders
in a forward head posture that's not something unfortunately that's going to be fixed just by
going on a hike a lot of these exercises were shown to me by kenneth wallis one of my early
mentors he ran a business called performance and postures and we actually did a pretty informative
video in 2013 as a while back it's kind of an old video but there's some really good information
in there in terms of the ideal kind of walking posture and he's really the expert on this stuff
so if you want to see more on that i would check out that video and his channel the thing about
this though is that it is a long term approach it's a it's a long game so i've just added a
15-minute follow-along video to my new program elements long game and as well as that it goes
into the two other really common postural issues that we see in modern day lifestyle which is
up across syndrome so basically rounding forward rounding of the shoulders and lower cross syndrome
which is forward tilting of the hips so if you're interested in checking out that the
link will be in the description so i hope that's been helpful to you if you have got some value out
of the video please hit the like button and for another follow along routine that is designed to
strengthen the weaker and smaller muscles in your back check out this routine i'll link it up here
i posted it last week and it's a really nice follow along that you can do 15-20 minutes and
get that back nice and strong that's about it for this video guys i'll see you on the summit