(upbeat piano music)
- Everybody, it's Dr. B and TDH,
Lethal Weapon Six comin atcha.
- It's tall dark and hansom
- -Tall
- is TDH in case you didn't know.
- Yeah - Yeah
- I'm with Patrick,
one of our newest exercise assistants the office.
We gonna talk about posture
and some things that you can do at home
to work on your posture.
So, what do you guys think of when we think of posture?
I think of this.
Right?
Everyone's on their phone or on a laptop.
A lot of people working from home.
Our whole lives are kind of in front of us.
We sit for work.
We sit for food.
We sit to go to work.
We sit to come back from work.
I sit doin' paperwork.
I'm workin' over patients like this.
So, everything is down like this but
that puts a lot of stress into our spines
so there are some things you can do at home
that counteract that.
There's some things we can do in
the office to counteract that.
We're to decrease the symptoms that arise
from having that forward head posture.
So Patrick, go into a forward head posture for me.
Just face that way and just kinda slouch
for me bit like you would normally.
So what's this do?
This gives us trigger points here.
It gives us trigger points here because our head always
wants to look at the horizon.
We always, our eyes always want
to be pointed at the horizon.
So when we fall this way, we want to tilt our head up
a little bit this way to look at, like this.
Obviously, we're over exaggerating a little bit here.
When we get some trigger points that show up here,
face that way again Patrick for me,
we get some trigger points that show up in the rhomboids and
the lower serratus muscles here, tightness across
through here, tightness in the erector group.
So, the first thing we want to do is start to foam roll
or do some at home soft tissue work on those muscles
to release the tension there.
So Patrick's gonna jump down on the floor
and show you some cool foam rolling techniques.
So right now, Patrick is gonna foam roll his upper back,
those lat muscles, those erector groups,
those rhomboids, the serratus group.
He's going to roll back and forth.
Now I always say, "When you're foam rolling if
"it doesn't hurt your not doin' it on the right muscle."
It's gonna be a little uncomfortable.
It's gonna be a little sore.
One way Patrick can get a little more exposure here
is he can cross his arms over his chest, or bring
his elbows together,
and that's gonna roll his shoulder blades out of the way
and expose some more muscles
and then he can roll side to side and kinda get
a little bit more on those muscles around those areas.
- I'm doing my lats.
Yeah, he's down into his lats a little bit.
He's rolling over a little more.
Those lat muscles come a little bit farther.
So if those muscles are chronically being told
to be tightened up or just, we slouch a lot
and our posture's gone bad and we're kinda like this,
those muscles are gonna be tight for a long time
so we wanna effectively roll on those muscles.
I like to do 40 seconds to a minute per muscle group.
Five to six minutes.
That's somethin' you can do every day, multiple times a day,
to loosen some of that stuff up.
The important thing is once we've loosened those muscles up
we want to retrain them in a healthy way so we've got that,
we go from here, back up through here.
Patrick's gonna jump into a
- Bretzel?
- Bretzel, yeah.
A nice way to stretch out and open up that upper back.
Patrick's gonna do the bretzel a couple times.
We call this the top half of the bretzel.
We call it bretzel 'cause it was named after a guy
and it looks like a pretzel.
His last name was B, bretzel.
Anyways, you can look it up.
Once we've loosened those muscles up a little bit
with the foam roller.
Look up at me Liam for a second.
What happens when we go into this flexion posture
in our T spine is that once we've flexed here,
to get it back up we need to do an extension,
but what really works well in the thoracis spine
is extension and rotation.
And rotation is really just one side flexing this way,
the other side extending.
So what we've done here is we've locked out the lumbar spine
so the lumbar spine and the hips aren't really moving.
And then Patrick's gonna open up his shoulder cage
and extend on the opposite side of his shoulder
and get that nice twisty rotation action
which gives us extension in the T spine,
which we've lost some of that posture exercises.
So Patrick's got some pretty good range of motion here.
He can get his arm to the floor here.
You want your shoulder in line with your scapula,
He's movin' pretty well but if I were to get down
and do this, watch out Patrick let's see how bad I am.
I got my hand locked down here.
I'm gonna open up.
Oh, oh my goodness.
A little different huh?
- [Patrick] Oh yeah.
- Yeah. (chuckles)
So for someone like me who can't reach the floor,
I'm gonna go and open up.
And I'm gonna breathe in
and as I exhale I'm gonna try to stretch.
I'm tryin' to pull my shoulder blade to the floor.
And then come back up.
I'm gonna do this like six to eight times just
to see if I can get a little bit further each time.
I'm gonna make sure this leg stays down
and that I'm getting a nice stretch in my hip,
it's a little bonus.
Oh, that feels good.
All right.
We're gonna do both sides, obviously.
Help me up.
So we've worked some rotation
through there, unilateral rotation.
We did one side bretzel, we'll do the other side bretzel.
The next thing we like go into
is some thoracis side extension work.
We've opened it up a little bit with rotation.
Now we want to open it up with extension.
So grab the dowel and go over to the bench over there.
So let's follow us over this way.
I think it's important when we're dealing with
an exercise program be it rehab, be it fitness
is that we layer things.
It's kinda like what we do in treatment here in the office.
We wanna to layer treatment.
We wanna get you out of pain
then we want to strengthen the area.
We wanna get you out of pain then we want
to get you movin' better, then we wanna build
a good foundation for exercises.
Same thing with this.
We foam roll to loosen the tissues up.
Now we want to do some mobility work on where the spine is.
We did rotation work, which is also extension
in the thoracic spine.
Now we're gonna go to straight extension.
This one will require some equipment
but it's really effective for getting
that straightness back into your spine.
If we look at Patrick he's on his knees.
He's on a pad 'cause this floor's a little uncomfortable
but you can do it on your floor here.
He's got a dowel in his hands, palm facing up.
If you don't have a dowel at home use a broomstick.
Use a mop.
Use a baseball bat, lacrosse stick, whatever you got.
You could hold, I don't know, a loaf of bread, right?
Anything else Patrick that comes to your mind?
- Nothing.
- The plunger.
Everyone has plungers.
Something that's a dowel, something you can hold there.
He's gonna, go ahead and run through the motion, Patrick.
So his elbows are on the edge
and he's gonna drop his hips straight back
and then extend in his thoracic spine and then come back up.
Come straight back.
We see this drop through here.
His head is staying in a neutral position.
He's not letting his head fall forward, that's wrong.
We want a head at a neutral spine.
Everything's straight through here
and then come back through.
Again, this is a go as far as you can, hold it
for a second, breathe, exhale.
As you exhale drop a little bit further, all right?
Again, six to eight repetitions.
This is really good range of motion.
If you watch me do this I'd probably be up kinda
where here is 'cause I don't move very well in that spine
'cause I've got bad posture 'cause I work on people all day.
But I do some of these things at home
and make sure it's not so bad
or I don't get symptoms because of it.
So, I think with the foam rolling,
with those two exercises, you can start to make a little bit
of a change or an impact on how you're posture is.
And I think if we give you 16 exercises you could do
them all but I think if all of you watching
just started doing these three exercises you would see
a big improvement on how your posture and your spine feels.
As always with any exercise
if you experience sharp pain while your doing it stop.
Go see a professional who handles pain like
a chiropractor or physical therapist.
But if your feelin' that stretch and that discomfort,
that pressure in that back as you start
to go in some of those positions.
Like when I was doin' the bretzel, I felt tight
in my right shoulder blade, but as soon
as I worked through it it felt a little bit better, right?
I was okay with it and I worked through some of that stuff.
Obviously, make a good judgment call for yourself.
If you guys have any questions or if your ready for part two
of our posture program tune in next time.
As always, thanks for watching.
(lighthearted piano music)