Proper posture is never thought about when choosing a healthy lifestyle, but it’s vital to your overall health because it allows the body to function efficiently. Sitting and standing up straight decreases back pain, boosts your immune system, allows vital organs to function fluently and can extend your lifespan.
If you are like the majority of Americans who sit in front of a computer for hours every day, the odds are your body is suffering from poor posture. Don’t blame your job or the demanding hours you’ve been putting in as the reason for your bad posture because it’s likely you developed these habits long ago. Luckily for you, it’s not too late to take steps to correct your posture. Along with our FDA-approved Posture-correcting apparel, here are seven easy exercises and stretches you can perform to fix the problem.
- Child’s Pose: If you have pain in your lower back and neck, this stretch will alleviate those ailments by stretching and lengthening your spine, glutes, and hamstrings.
- Forward Fold: Similar to the child’s pose, this stretch helps diminish pain in the back and neck by stretching out the spine, glutes, and hamstrings by opening up your hips and legs.
- Cat-Cow: Practicing cat cow helps stretch out and massage the spine. It subdues tension in the shoulders, torso, and neck while promoting blood circulation.
- Planks: A strong core is key to proper posture. Strong core muscles help us to sit up straight, and the best thing about this exercise is there are multiple variations.
- Back Extensions: A weak back is usually a sign of slouching, and back extensions will help strengthen your back so you can stay upright. You can even ramp it up by laying with your arms straight out over your head and lifting them up at the same time as your legs.
- Hip Hinge: Keeping your spine aligned is important, and the hip hinge attacks the glutes, hamstrings and erector spinae (lower back) muscles to keep your hips and lower back straight.
- Dead Bug: This harder-than-it-looks core exercise trains your spinal stabilizers to work not just isometrically, but while your arms and legs are moving – just like they need to in real life.
These basic exercises combined with IFGfit's PPR posture apparel technology can provide you with the tools and knowledge to be on the fast track to great posture. Their technology works through muscle proprioception to retrain the body on the correct posture and stance, relieving neck/back pain, improving breathing with chest expansion and accelerating recovery. The only thing left is for you to commit yourself to these simple exercises and improve your health.
