Fix Bad Posture in 5 Minutes (FOREVER!)

If you are looking for a posture routine to help you fix bad posture in 5 minutes and all the things that come with it like rounded shoulders, a forward head, craned neck and anterior pelvic tilt, then you are going to want to watch. Here I’m giving you a series of posture correction exercises that

your feet along a straight line and then just  turn your toes out ever so slightly. And then from there, I want you to lock your knees out. In  other words, extend them fully by contracting your quads at the same time, squeeze those glutes  together. If you’ve done this right with your foot positioning on the ground, you should feel  a really good contraction here. And then finally, what I want you to do is make a fist with your  thumb just like this, and then put that thumb alongside your sternum.

And all I want you to  do is take the knuckles that are now facing somewhat at an angle downward and point them  up by lifting your sternum. Think that you have a glass of water attached to your sternum  and just lift it so that none of it is falling out the front of the glass. In this position,  you’re going to feel exactly what it’s supposed to feel like to be in this better posture. And  ironically, we fixed the thoracic extension loss by starting from the ground up. But that’s how  the kinetic chain works.

But of course, you’re not going to walk around like this all the time  because we really haven’t fixed anything yet. But if I could give you a quick  routine to reinforce these things, well, that’s where the real benefits occur. And  by a quick I mean literally just 5 minutes. So, you’ve got five exercises, two here for the  thoracic area and two for the glutes and then we have one combo exercise. And the way we structure  it, is basically taking those first two A and B perform them for 30 seconds apiece.

Thoracic for  30, glutes for 30, you go back, thoracic for 30, includes for 30. That’s two minutes, you do 30  seconds of the combo exercise. Now if you don’t have a lot of time, you can stop right there. But  if you’ve got two and a half extra minutes, it’ll be well worth your time to do exercises C and D  in the same manner. Thoracic for 30 seconds and glutes, you go back again and repeat that one more  time and you finish one more time with that combo exercise.

That’s a total of just five minutes. And the first thoracic exercise is one that’s actually going to help us to attack the weakness  in the upper back that oftentimes contributes to that poor posture. We call this one the Superman,  and it’s very easily performed here down on the floor. You take your fists, you put them right  here on that sternum again. And this time we’re going to try to reveal our S, that’s where the  Superman comes from, by spreading across the chest and digging your elbows down into the floor.

And if you do this properly, you’re going to feel those muscles between the shoulder blades  engage to allow you to lift that sternum up. And think about the test we just did. Take your  hand and think about raising it as high as you can by lifting the sternum and tilting backwards  at the same time. You perform this as repetitions, as many as you can get that are high quality that  you can perform within that 30 second time period. And then you move on to exercise number two.

And this too, can be performed right down here on the floor. But this time we’re shifting  our focus to the glutes. So, when we talk about glute weakness, it’s not the absolute  level of strength that you’re missing here, but more importantly, your strength endurance. Because when we’re talking about posture flaws, you need to be able to have the ability to  control it for a long period of time. So, the glute march is a great way to do this.

You get into this bridge position here, trying to create a straight line from  the thighs all the way down to the torso, and now you’re just going to alternate your foot  lift about five or six inches on the left and five or six inches on the right. But most importantly,  without allowing a drop of the pelvis when you do lift the leg. So not dropping this way and not  dropping to one side when you lift the foot up. The idea, as always, is to make sure you perform  quality repetitions for those 30 seconds and when you’re done, you move on to the combo exercise. Now, with 30 seconds of each of those exercises performed, you’re now one minute into the  routine.

You repeat that combination one more time and you’re two minutes in total. Now,  we’ve performed the 30 seconds, however, of that combination exercises. This is one of my all-time  favorites is a Bridge of Reach Over. So now we’re going to go back to that bridge, but this time  reach across and back with the opposite arm. So, we’re getting that thoracic rotation and  extension at the same time.

We’re getting that lift in activation through the glutes so we  can tie in both of these deficits and work on them all at one time and kind of bring it all  together with just this final 30 seconds. So, the second thoracic exercise actually just  requires a chair. You come down here on the floor and you take your elbows and you put them on  top of the chair and your hands are going to go on the top of your upper back. Now, at this point,  your goal is to just sink yourself down, really trying to lead with your chest. In other words,  try to touch your chest to the ground, obviously being limited by the fact that your elbows  are preventing you from going too, too low.

But this is great because it focuses in right  on that area that we spoke about earlier. The key here is to perform these as repetitions as  well by lifting up and then again resetting and dropping the chest down as best you can. The  additional benefit that comes from this is that we’re getting a good lat stretch and  we know that the lats are also internal rotators of the shoulder contributing to  more of that rounded, hunched posture, so we’re getting a double bang for our buck. Remember, perform high quality repetitions for 30 seconds and move on to the next glute exercise. And that exercise is actually called a Wall DL, which is utilizing an RDL pattern, but it’s  helping to strengthen those glutes once again and establish full hip extension while also  reinforcing that thoracic extension that we’re looking for.

So, you put your hands up  against the wall like this and you drive your knee up into the wall as well. Now what we’re  really focusing on is actually this down leg, because what I want to do at this point is kick  my foot backwards to hinge but establish this flex hip position and then drive off of that utilizing  the glute to get through full hip extension. The only way I’m getting my knee back to the wall  is to fully extend through the hip. And again, full hip extension is good glute activation and  by doing that we’re fixing the pelvis from below and helping to reinforce that upper back. And oh, by the way, the upper back is being reinforced in this position by keeping the hands  in contact with the wall, which establishes the same dip that we had on that chair exercise  to keep that extension that we’re looking for.

The first time through you go 30 seconds on the  right leg and the second time you perform this, you go 30 seconds on the left leg. Now, remember, after performing these C and D exercises twice, you’ve got one 30 second time  period left over and that’s going to be reserved once again for that E exercise, the combo bridge  and reach over that you’re going to do for one final period of 30 seconds. Guys remember, when  it comes to creating meaningful change, the only way we can get there is through consistency. And  the only way I believe we can get consistency is when the tasks that you’re being asked to do is  not that daunting. This is short, this is quick, but I promise you it will be effective.

If you’re looking for a complete workout guys that are equally effective and not