♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
(hands clapping) - Hi folks.
I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And together we're the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Today, we're going to go over top five stretches
to fix your posture.
That's assuming that your posture is bad.
We're gonna talk about that
but let's start right away with the chin tucks, Brad.
- Bob, their posture likely is bad.
At least some of the times.
Ours certainly is.
Right, if you're human. - (laughs)
It's likely it's going happen
because gravity works on you over time.
And most us are on computers, that's a part of the day.
Or on their phone.
And it drags you forward.
- Yes, all right, here we go.
- First one, we gotta have chin tucks.
- Yes, yes.
You can do them standing, you can do them sitting.
You can do them in the car.
- Now, why are we doing chin tucks?
Because quite often
your chin is poking forward with the computer.
- Head forward posture.
No good.
- So, this realigns your neck
and also stretches the muscles back here.
- Just make sure your shoulders are back while you do it.
- You just tuck your chin in
like someone's throwing a pie in your face
and you're backing up.
And you can do a little over pressure.
You can take your fingers and push on your chin
or you can take the crux of your thumb
and push on your chin.
- Gentle pressure, doesn't have to be aggressive.
- We're not going up.
We're not going down.
We're going straight back.
- Five to 10 of them is good.
This next one, Brad, I think is a key one
because I think a lot of people have,
if you don't mind standing,
and showing this right in here.
It's rounded out.
And that throws the neck off.
And it also throws the low back off.
So, we want to stretch this area in here.
There's a lot of ways you can do this.
We're going give some ways that cost nothing.
Let's talk about a tennis ball.
You have to have a tennis ball.
We put a couple to a sock here
and that's just to keep them together.
Why don't you hold these right here?
Actually, why don't you turn around Brad?
I'll show you what we're gonna do.
- Sure.
We're going actually hit this area right here
between the shoulder blades
but we're not on the spine either
because the balls are on either side of the spine
and you can lie on this.
You can even roll on this.
- Yes.
And it will give you some
leverage.
- Right.
- We're working on the ribs and that spine
and trying to mobilize the joints.
We're not necessarily stretching muscles.
We're mobilizing the joints and relaxing the muscles.
Bob is positioning it right now.
- And along with this you can actually take your hands
and go over like this.
And you could roll.
Now, this is going work better on a floor
but I wanted to show you just so you could see.
- Beds are soft, the tennis balls are going to sink into it.
You could start here because on the floor
it is quite a bit more aggressive.
- For some of you, it's going to be really aggressive.
And you're going to start off with maybe a towel
on the tennis balls or a pillow under your head.
- So, you have a nice towel.
Fold it up neatly so it's not all wrinkled up
and just set that over the top.
- Brad's going to show it with a softball.
- After you do it like this, I can do it like this.
I could put the towel over it.
That would be too soft for me.
I'm going to go like this.
- [Bob] Brad's been doing this for a while now
so he can tolerate a lot more
stress on the area.
- Once you do this for a little while
you'll find that it feels like,
oh boy, I just got a really good crack in my back.
It feels good.
It still kind of hurts, but it hurts so good.
- [Bob] Eventually, you'll like the pain.
- So, if you've got a big softball
even that's too aggressive for me.
I do take a towel, put it over and then I'm gonna go.
- [Bob] Would that make you a masochist?
I think a sadist is
putting pain on somebody else
but a masochist is
putting pain on yourself.
- I don't know, Bob, this is good. Whatever it is.
Oops.
This is what'll happen, the ball just kind of slipped out.
If you really like this,
and you want to go to the next level,
you may want to purchase something.
- You could get the back pod
which is shaped for this type of problem.
And it works really, really well with costochondritis.
- [Brad] Which is chest pain, which I deal with.
This has been really good.
There we go.
- [Bob] We've had the inventor
on our podcast a couple times.
Steve August.
- Oh, there we go.
- He really has done a lot for costochondritis
in the medical world.
- I do go back and forth on this one on a regular basis.
It's not rolling but it still gets to fashion
the muscles and the ribs.
I just enjoy doing that.
It really stretches it well.
- Brad has stake in that because you had costochondritis.
- Oh, I think I still do Bob.
If I don't do this, I still get chest pain.
- It reminds you, huh?
- Yeah, it's not an enjoyable thing.
- Next one.
A lot of people, their chest muscles have tighten up
and internally rotates their shoulders
and they have this kind of look.
I'm exaggerating
but that's exactly what
a severe form of it would be.
- (laughs) We wanna pull back.
- Open up.
- You can just do a simple "W" stretch.
- Oh, the "W".
- Or, you can do your "W" in a corner.
- Yeah, that gives you a little leverage.
And we're talking about this before.
You do not want to get real aggressive with this
because it's hard on the shoulder joint.
- You're trying to go to what we would call neutrals.
You don't bring the shoulders way back.
We're gonna do a video which is going to show you why
you don't want the shoulders way back.
- And you can vary up here, here
and you'll see
it depends on which muscles are tighter.
Oh my goodness.
- All right.
Another thing, if your hip flexors are tight,
like my flexors.
They're right in the front of the hip,
they will pull your back over like this
and keep you in a rounded out position.
So, you want to make sure these are stretched out.
They are tight on a lot of people who sit a lot.
One thing you can do is a simple way I do it.
And some people take a pillow under their knees to do this
but I'm good.
So, you just lean forward like this
and stretch the back leg.
I can even go the other way here.
- This is nice, you got the stripe there.
You can see the angle from the shoulder to the hip joint
and it goes back and that's getting that hip flexor.
- You can do it on a bed too.
You can just bring the one leg off.
Let's stretch and lock the pelvis in place
by bringing this leg up.
- This is the one being stretched.
Plus, you're getting the hip and the knee stretched
the other direction.
- I'm putting stress on that muscle.
- If I push down here, gently, Bob feels more of a stretch
on that hip flexor.
- Yes I do.
The final one is, a lot of people,
their back starts to get tight.
They get that forward flexion.
We're just going to start having you do
a little bit of standing extensions.
- This does hip flexors a little bit too, right?
- Exactly.
So just gentle stretches.
If you tolerate it, you can go back further.
- If you're older, sixties, seventies
you may be starting to get some stenosis.
So, when you go back, when you've had enough, just go back.
When you're younger, you'll be able to go way back.
- Like Brad, he's able to go, look at that.
- I go about this far.
10, 20 years ago I could go back farther.
And you put your hands like this or like this
and you can do two or three of those
every half hour.
You get out of the car, before you get in the car,
you stretch backwards.
Car seats usually have a tendency
to flex you forward.
- With all these, if you could do them throughout the day
it's going to make a big difference.
It's going to help.
Like every hour.
- With the exception of the balls and stuff
those are once or twice a day. - Exactly.
That's once a day, right.
- But some of these like, like this one.
- Well, the chin tucks, you can do that a lot.
- Stretched into the corner.
- Do it while you're driving, it's a great time to do it.
People stare at you and just wave at them.
- It won't be long and everyone will be doing
chin tucks in the car.
It's gonna be the "in" thing.
- That's right.
All right, thanks for watching folks.
- Enjoy.