This article is a transcribed edited summary of a video Bob and Brad recorded in March of 2024. For the original video go to https://youtu.be/87nFLQno0qQ
Brad: Do you want to avoid slouchism? You may be asking what slouchism is. This is as a result of head forward posture constantly, rounded shoulders, and a rounded upper back. You have that hunchback starting. It's so much promoted by bad habits like looking at our phones 23.7 hours per day. Also working at our computer, sitting in our car, sitting at the table with poor posture.
Mike: What do you do with your other .3 hours of the day, sleep?
Brad: We don't really know yet. Now the reality is most people aren't aware of their posture. They're not aware if they're slouched forward unless there's a photograph or someone actually says, "Boy, your posture needs to be taken care of and straightened up." My wife does that for me, so that helps. I did that with my daughter growing up. It was a good thing. But most people don't have that help. Let's test your posture using the wall. Mike has his back to the wall. Can you talk to him about how to do a simple self-test for posture?
Mike: So when you go up to the wall, make sure you can get three points of contact. I like to do buttocks, shoulder blades, and then head. If you can do this, you have good posture and you can get in this position. If you do this, say you can get your butt and shoulders, but your head is kind of stuck forward, you're starting to get some slouchism. This is a simple test you can do to check if you have a forward head posture.
Brad: That's right. I want to go over a couple of little small points. Some people will try to touch their heads by extending up.
Brad: That doesn't count. You need to touch your head with your chin in. There we go. And see if you can get the shoulders back because that's part of it as well. So a couple of little points. Now if you can do all this without any problem, head back, shoulders back, everything is good, you're going to go to the next step. We have a three-step posture exercise that's going to work well. If you cannot get your head back or your shoulders back, there's one thing you have to do to break things up and get your posture so it's mobile and going to be looking good. So let's go to that little step. If you did not pass the wall test, you're slouched. You cannot get your shoulders back and your head back, there's a lot of tightness in the back of the shoulders here as well as in the front musculature.
Brad: We need to loosen that up so we can get back to work. There we go. We can get to that good posture. Mike's going to show you how you can do that using a towel roll and going to the floor. Go ahead, Mike.
Mike: So you're going to need a rolled-up towel. We actually have a bedsheet and towel rolled up, simply taped around. You can certainly use a foam roller if you want if you have one instead. Now I'm going to place this in the middle of my back between my shoulder blades. So my head is off of it and the first thing you're going to do is see if gravity can just pull your head down and you can stretch into extension. This will be the opposite direction of that bad flex posture.
Mike: If this seems easy to you and not a problem, we're going to start working on the tight pec muscles. Now, laying like this for a prolonged period while doing a pec stretch gets a little uncomfortable for my neck. So I'm going to use some pillows. As you can see, my head still gets to neutral. I'm not flexed while I'm doing this. So I'm actually going to do what looks like snow angels. If you live anywhere with snow, you know what they are. I'm going to touch my hands down to the ground and bring it up as high as I can. I have the pillows in the way now so I can't even hear anything plugging my ears. And you're going to go back down.
Mike: Go to what feels good for you. If you're very rounded, obviously, you're going to struggle. You want to make sure before you start bringing up overhead that you can touch your hands at least close to the floor and then start bringing them up. Go slowly and breathe through this. This is a little trick we got from our friend, Rick Olderman.
Brad: Yes. Now one thing I've done with patients on a regular basis is if they have really rounded shoulders and they have the roll underneath their shoulders, can you bring your arms down? And if you want to have a friend or a family member that you trust, just have them put your arms down, and relax. I just put some gentle pressure here to help stretch out the muscles in here. It'll accelerate the process. Again, someone that you trust and is going to be nice to you. The stretch should feel good.
Mike: I don't trust Brad.
Brad: All right, now the master stretcher is three steps to it. This is one that you can do. It's very quick and easy. I'm going to break it down first and you can actually go to a wall and do it with me. So we're going to again, put your buttock up against the wall so your belt line is hitting shoulders against the wall. Now the first thing we're going to do is simply shoulders back, sternum, or chest out. So we do this once. We're going to do it two times and we're going to do it three times.
Brad: The next thing is to get the shoulders back and stretch. And now we're going to get the chin tuck. So we're not going back to touch your head looking up. That's wrong. We're going to keep the chin level sliding back like this. So if there's a table there or your hand, you slide your chin up there and you'll feel a stretch. If you get headaches, this is a nice stretch. It can actually get rid of those headaches as well. Do three of those.
Brad: And then once we're there, we're going to go up to this position and we can do Ws or like the snow angels that Mike was talking about and do that three times.
Brad: Okay? Now once you get good at this and you remember it, you simply go to the wall, you do your stretches here, two and then three, one and two, three hold and up, and do the whole thing. If you want to do it more than three up, three reps, you're certainly welcome to do it. That'll take you about 19 seconds. It's not a big deal, just get used to it and do it throughout the day. We have some other hacks that can really help your posture. Avoiding slouches, I mean, gets you back up where you need to be.
Mike: So we're going to go over four additional stretches you can try to help work on your posture. Some of them obviously, if you're very bent over, it might be kind of challenging. So work on the things Brad showed first. You could try these if you want if they feel good for you. The first one, you're going to need some type of object to hold onto. You can use a belt, a bed sheet, or a stick of sorts. Brad's holding the Booyah Stik there. Typically, you want to grab a little bit wider out with this and we're going to just go over our head and then back and place it kind of on our shoulder blade region. We're kind of making the W shape Brad was showing on the wall. Again, we're just holding onto something. You can do this in a seated or standing position. Obviously, if you're seated, you can't really have something right behind you because you're probably going to hit the chair.
Brad: One thing that we'll keep in mind when you do this, make sure your head stays in that neutral position. Don't go forward with your head to get the stick behind or the belt. You can use a broomstick, Dowling, or whatever you need. It needs to be four or five feet long. But that's important not to do the head forward.
Brad: If you can't get behind the head, that's okay. Just stop there. Eventually, you'll get there.
Mike: Another common issue people have is not grabbing wide enough. You could see for me if I'm too close together, this is pretty challenging. So to make it a little bit easier, I just go out a little bit wider. Makes it easier.
Brad: There you go. Let's go to the infamous door stretch.
Mike: Okay, the next stretch we're going to do is the doorway stretch. Now we're again going to make a "W." If you see me right now, I am making a "W" shape for winning. As Brad would say, we could say Winnipeg, Canada. Why not? Okay, so we got a door frame here. I'm going to go into it. Both hands are going to touch. The more you go into the door frame and lean through it, the more stretch you're going to feel. You could see if I'm kind of rounded forward, this is going to help push back and straighten my posture. It's basically the reverse of doing the wall stretch.
Brad: That's right. And again, don't let your head go forward with it. Keep it in that nice neutral position up. That's all you do. Simply every time you walk through the door, stretch one or two times and continue on. It's going to be a big fad. Come on up, I can guarantee you. All right, the next stretch is you can do a seated position and a firm chair. You can do it in an office chair as long as it's stable and the back does not come up too high. The back has to be at about shoulder-blade height. Go ahead, Mike.
Mike: So what you're going to do, again, especially if you have a forward-rounded posture, is start in a good posture position. You're going to take your arms and raise them above your head. Some people call this the hallelujah stretch. You can call whatever you want. Maybe you're making a field goal post with your arms. Just bring them up, keep the back in contact, and go back down.
Mike: You can also do the "W" shape if you want with this. Essentially, all you want to do is make sure you're getting that extension pattern, opening up the pecs, and getting a nice good stretch here. You can do this for reps. Or if you just want to kinda hold this position for 15, to 30 seconds, you can certainly do that. Now if you want to get a little more stretching with this, you can take a ball. We just have a kickball here, slightly deflated. It makes it a little easier for you. So I just put it in my lower back. You could pick what position you want. You can go up more midback, whatever region you want, and then you're simply going to go back and kind of arch it kind of rolls with you. It feels really good to get a little bit more back extension with this variation, but it feels really good.
Brad: Yeah, you can't go wrong with the ball. If you get to the point with the ball, you know your posture's improving. Mobility's improving. It's a wonderful thing. Let's go to the next one. Now there's an option if you really want to get after this posture and get it done in a hurry. And you have that hunch that rounded back below the neck, there is this device that we actually invented. It's called the Posture Pad, and it's designed specifically for this. It's a wedge shape. You can use these balls that go in there. I'm going to talk about that in a second. You simply on the floor, you're going to use this. Put it down like this. This has a radius or rounded edge. It's that way specifically. So you can work on the individual vertebra levels to break up that rigidity and get that posture to improve. I'm going to lie on it and simply extend back. Oh, my back just cracked, you will feel that. I'm at the mid-level of my back now I'm actually going to slide down one level and extend back. You can put your hands at your side. I like to hold my head, it's more comfortably, elbows back, and really get a nice stretch.
Brad: I can feel that being very specific on my back. And you'll work that. You'll spend, you know, only about a minute or two doing this, but it's best to do it throughout the day. Now you can break up the tightness in the back a little more aggressively by using the tennis balls that nicely fit in the holes. You can go two, you can do four. The dark blue balls are a little more rigid and the light blue are softer. Do whatever you need for comfort or aggressiveness. I'm going to put all four in there. And they go into the muscles on each side of the back and you can kind of work up and down. You can feel those muscles work. If there's any knots in the muscles, it'll loosen those up. And then do the extension, tuck the chin in.
Brad: There we go. Looks very nice. It's a nice device. If you're interested, go to bobandbrad.com, we do have them for sale there. Otherwise, you'd use the other things that we talked about. They'll work as well. What else, Mike?
Mike: If you're having some trouble with that and some neck pain or stiffness, you can certainly put a little throw pillow behind your head. Brad does not have slouchism.
Brad: Yeah, not anymore. So the other thing is actually when you're sitting around in the airport or at the bus stop or anywhere, do a little people-watching. And you're going to be amazed at, there's a number of people that are slouched over and at an early age, which is a little problematic. It bothers me. It's one of those things, you know.
Mike: You must like the people watching you travel.
Brad: That's right, I do. I was in the airport the other day and I saw 327 people with slouched backs.
Mike: Glad you tallied them.
Brad: No, seriously. Look at other people, family members. If you have your children or your spouse and they're slouched a little bit, do them a favor. Say, you know, "Let's straighten up." Hopefully, it's taken well. My wife does it to me on a regular basis and I love her for it.
Mike: If you'd like to check out more videos on how to fix your posture, check out our video "Single BEST 60 Second Posture Exercise, You Can Do It ANYWHERE!" Even at the airport, right?
Brad: That's right. This is a really good video. I watched it again. It's like, "Oh, I really like that exercise." I'm going to do it again shortly because it's a super exercise. Very accurate too. Very nice.
Mike: Bye.
Brad: Take care, be healthy, fit, pain-free, and anything else that you can think to be happy.
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