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it is unfortunately a very common posture issue due to how many of us are hunched over phones and computer keyboards all day. unrounding your shoulders from the front of your body to the sides where they should be will give you less neck pain and make you look more confident/attractive. my favorite exercises to do throughout the day for correcting this are chin tucks, squeezing your shoulder blades together, and reverse pec decks when youre in the gym. also do doorway stretches and others like it to loosen your chest muscles.
how can you tell if your shoulders are rounded? let your arms hang down while standing up and stick your thumbs out. if they are pointing directly at each other, your shoulders are rounded too forward. if they are sticking out straight ahead of you, then you have nothing to worry about :)
Dec 4, 2024
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First you need to engage your core at all times—this doesn’t mean sucking it in and keeping it tight; it’s more like gently, ever so slightly drawing your belly button up and back towards your spine and breathing through your diagram just enough to keep those muscles activated. Strengthen your core—it protects the spine and gives you the power to keep all of your other muscles engaged!
When standing, your head, heart (shoulders and upper chest), hips, and feet should ideally be in alignment. Obviously the same goes for sitting as far as the torso is concerned.
People tend to:
* have forward neck posture from mouth breathing and being on their phones—pull your head back and keep your chin lifted! (Try yoga for text neck)
* slouch and slump in their shoulders—pull the heads of your shoulders back and rotate them outwards; retract your shoulder blades by drawing them back and towards the spine.
* tilt and lean their pelvis and hips—your tailbone should be scooping forward and down and your hips should ideally be perpendicular to the floor.
Check yourself throughout the day and see if you’re in alignment.
It takes active work to have good posture. Your posture-supporting muscles are most likely weak. I would recommend light body weight strength training like Pilates, barre, or yoga and I would also encourage you to do chakra yoga—starting at the root chakra and working your way up. This will help you systematically get into alignment at every chakra which are essentially the posture points I identified above (I love Jen Hilman’s 7-day chakra series).
You might want to look into somatic yoga and Pilates and body scan meditations too because you’re probably not very aware of your body.
I sit on the front edge of seats whenever I’m not lounging on the couch (deeply engrained habit from playing viola for years). I think this helps because it’s very easy to slouch when you’re leaning on the back of a chair for support rather than using your own muscles to stay upright.
There have been times where I’ve regressed and I bought an adjustable posture corrector to help—they’re like tight backpack straps for both shoulders that connect in the back and pull your shoulders back.
That’s about all I can say… posture is very important to me because it’s essential for your health and we’ll-being and it makes you appear confident and elegant. hope this helps! 💋
Dec 7, 2024
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I struggled with slouching FOREVER. No amount of 'sit up straight' mindfulness during the day ever worked for me. In fact, I was a ballet dancer for 10 years, knew what good posture was per se but outside of dancing it just didn’t translate into my day to day and I still struggled.
The real game-changer for me happened earlier this year: With no intention of working on my posture I just started shifting my focus from lower body workouts at the gym to back and arm exercises, using machines as well as dumbbells. Suddenly my posture improved SO much. I noticed that my head started to naturally align with my spine again but without me forcing myself to stand straight. I think overhead movements, in particular, made the biggest difference. Turns out, I didn’t have bad posture or laziness. I just had underdeveloped upper back and shoulder muscles 💪🏽
Dec 7, 2024
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and watching other people sit up straight when someone mentions it.
Feb 17, 2024
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just joined today, really like PI but the web ui is making my phone's browser pretty sluggish. granted i am using firefox on a linux distro so im definitely a very rare edge case. not sure what frontend stack yall are running but it seems to be pretty cpu intensive, has been draining my battery as well. i run postmarketos on a oneplus 6 if that helps
Nov 26, 2024