Hi, I'm Michelle, and today I'm going to help you with some exercises. Some quick exercises that can
help you overcome that forward rounded position. Many of us are spending hours over keyboards,
and we're spending hours looking at our mobile phones hunched forward and to overcome that,
we need to do two things, we need to stretch out our chest, and we need to strengthen our back.
So I'm going to show you some ways of doing those things. In today's session, we're going to start
with some little, a little warmup, and then we're going to go through some exercises after that.
Let's get started. So we're going to start with our stretches. Let's start with a towel. So you
could also use a broomstick for this, but I'm going to start with a towel for the purposes
of this video. Hands of wider than shoulders, bend your knees, breathe in, and breathe out,
we're going to go into our V stretch. So take the towel back, push your chest forward,
and breathe in, and breathe out, push your chest forward. So you're really opening up through your
chest stretching out through your chest, and these are the muscles that can pull you forward
when they get tight. Breathe out. I'm going to do one more of these stretches, breathing in,
keep the knees soft, take the load off your back, breathe out. Great! And now bring it
down into the T. So you can see the T there with my arms, elbows up at right angles, breathing in,
and breathe out, bring that towel right back. So really push the chest forward. This is just
stretching out a different part of our pecs or our chest muscles breathing in and breathe out. Let's
do two more of these really lovely stretch for the chest isn't it? Breathing in, breathe out,
and once more breathing in, and breathe out. Great! And bring the towel back up and over.
All right, now let's move down to the ground and we're going to do some foam roller just to stretch
out our back at home. So now we're going to start working at any joint stiffness. And again,
some still some muscle release through our back, but also to some joint stiffness. So,
if you're round and forward, the roller is a really nice way of getting some extension
into the spine. So bringing your body back, let's bring the elbows back, lifting up your bottom and
start to just do some rolls. So rolling out the muscles in the back, and you can extend back
keeping the head in line with the rest of the body trying not to leave the chin for extended, head
extended. Couple more of those in that position and if you want to get deeper into the joints,
you can bring your elbows close, and actually extend back there. So you can see that we're doing
our mobilization and movement exercises before we start our strength exercises. So we're trying
to get our bodies straight up in preparation for doing our strengthening exercises, which will hold
us tall, and do one more of that is breathing in, and breathing out, and coming back up.
And we're going to start with a push back exercise. So this is first exercise that
forehead's down, hands are down and we're starting to strengthen the muscle in the back the muscles
between the shoulder blades and the spine. These are called the rhomboids and the middle tracks,
or the middle and lower traps. So forehead's down, we're breathing out and we're lifting up,
and down, you can see I've got my palms position down, and I'm pulling my shoulders just slightly
away from my ears making my neck slot neck long. So this muscle group these muscle groups in
through this area here and the muscles that are working so squeezing back. Now if you'd like to
add to the challenge there, you can bring your elbows wide, and you can keep your phone tucked.
I'm just facing you so I can talk to you at home. So lifting up, and taking it down, and really
getting a good squeeze in between your shoulder blades, and down. So far it should be down on the
ground. The head stays in contact with the mat, the feet stay in contact, and really squeezed in
between your shoulder blades, and release down slowly, and then you can progress this again by
going into a Y. So a Y, is this exercise where you raising your arms forward and back is all
back strengthen is, now lifting up this time you can actually lift the head and shoulders
and down and you can see that I'm not lifting my head backwards. I'm exhaling with the lift,
and down I'm keeping my third down and lifting up, tummy staying in contact, chin staying down,
talk to one more time and lifting up and coming down slowly. So you can do any of those back
strengthening exercises, progressing through that little sequence that I've just showed you.
So if you have access to a gym, you can also do some low-row exercises to strengthen through your
middle back. This is a low rope exercise. So what we're going to do is sit nice and tall,
I'm going to exhale and bring the handles in fairly low, you can see I'm not bringing it in
high, because that will actually use my neck and shoulder as I'm trying to use the muscles
between my shoulder blades. So breathing out, and back, and again out, and back. So alternatively,
if you're doing this exercise at home, you can use some tubing that I've got here are some
band. And again, standing nice and tall, knees are soft, and pulling back again,
performing the same action, as we were just doing on the low row machine. And again,
I'm really accentuating pushing my chest out upwards, and squeezing my shoulder blades together
to really strengthen those muscles that are going to hold me tall, and stop me slouching forward,
breathing out with the effort. And again, I'm pulling my shoulders away from my ears.
So, to practice good posture in standing, it's a matter of standing tall, so you're gonna think
about not locking your knees or just keeping them slightly soft, but lifting up through your trunk
and the way you do that is by lifting up through the crown of the head. So that's the back part of
the head, lifting up and imagining your string is pulling you upwards and when you lift that way,
you can feel how your spine becomes lengthened. So, you're not bringing your head back,
you're actually lifting up through the back and I'll just demonstrate that sideways. So
you're lifting that part of the spine up and relaxing the shoulders back and down. So,
it isn't a matter of pulling your shoulders back, that'll actually make things worse. It's just a
matter of standing tall with the chest raised and lifting through the spine and lengthening.
So, haven't we gone through quite a bit there today? We've talked about how to release the
chest muscles, we've gone through strengthen the back muscles, and we also did a little
bit of joint mobilization as well over the foam roller, and then we've just talked about posture
as well. So all those things combined, how you can address your hunched back foot posture,
and bring yourself into a nice, tall, upright posture. I hope that really helps
you with your posture. Thanks so much for watching today, and I'll see you next time.