Read the transcript for this video:

Good morning and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King. I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage in North Aurora. And I'm Here today with your third part of a three-part series talking about posture. And today we're going to talk about exercises. We just talked about the first ones, just general posture using your alarm on your phone to reset, second part was some stretches we talked about. Today, we're going to talk about some strengthening exercises. Easy, basically, Neuromuscular resetting exercises, getting to fire the muscles correctly that should be firing to help you with supporting your posture. The first exercise is going to be what we call a wall slide. So you're going to grab a couple of dish towels or cloths or washcloths, whatever, because we don't want to mess up the walls. You basically put them on the sides, they're going to wrap around the pinky side. So you're going to hold them in your Palm's lung. Fold over. You start roughly at shoulder height and we're going to slide our arms up on a B pattern to as high as we possibly can. Do not shrug your shoulders. Getting good posture, lining ears with shoulders, with trunk. Slide our hands up as far as we possibly can, so we're at the peak. When we're at the peak, now we do a gentle shrug and then after you shrug, keep that, and now you're going to pull your arms off the wall and then back down, slide shrug, lift off the wall, squeeze those shoulder blades together gently, put them back off the wall and then relax down easy. Slide, shrug, lift, slide, shrug, lift. You do about three sets of six of that one. So not too many of them.

Next exercise you would do is what is called a Scapular Retraction or basically, shoulder blade squeezes. And you can do this in sitting, standing, or lying down in different positions throughout the day. So in a nice upright position, if you're doing it standing, you can gently squeeze your shoulder blades together. I'm not doing a force gum military position, I'm just gently squeezing my shoulder blade together 10 to 15 repetitions one to two sets of that, and you can do that periodically throughout the day, too. Like I said before when the alarm goes off and reset your posture, you can do a stretch. You can get up and do one of these exercises over lunch break. You can do one or two of these things, two or three of these things just takes a couple of minutes and then you can do a couple more things when you go home. So you can just break it up throughout the day and make it logistically work for you.

The last exercise we're going to do is what we call a Bob Head. We start working the neck muscles a little bit here to help with your posture. We need to start getting the deep neck flexors of your spine to start supporting your head and your neck a little bit. So we're not in all this position. So those things aren't firing when we're in a deep slouch position for too long. So everybody knows what a bobblehead is, right? So we call it in the clinic, "A yes dear nod". So you're in a good position to start with lining ear holes with the new shoulder and trunk, and you're just doing a very small, "yes dear". You do not want to feel these muscles fired at all; it's recruiting the deep neck muscles. So we have our clients start typically laying on their backs. So they'll lie down on your back, knees bent, the head is supported with a proper pillow, and you're just doing that small little motion, "yes dear". Now, as I tell all my clients if you feel like you're doing nothing, you're doing it correctly. If you feel like this is a waste of time, you're most likely doing it correctly. Small up and down motion, bring your chin down towards your throat to your neck, "yes dear," "yes dear" just like a bobblehead. As I said, you can do it in sitting and a car is great because you can use your headrest and you can hit a stoplight and you can do that shoulder blade squeezes and you can do some yes dear bobblehead, chin nods. And those you can do 15 to 30 of those, couple two or three times throughout the day as well. So now you have posture reset, you have some stretches to do throughout the day. Now you have some general strengthening exercises, and some muscle recruitment exercises to get the right muscles firing to help you attack dealing with maybe some poor posture that you're wanting to correct this year. If you have any other questions about this stuff, about posture, about mechanical issues, things you need more or want further help with. Please don't hesitate to give us a call at (630) 892-8003. And we'll see you next week for your Weekly Cup of Joe. Bye.