Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 1490: How to Improve Your Posture

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin lay out three simple steps to improving your posture. How out of alignment we are. (2:53) Why trainers do assessments. (3:56) The most common posture deviations. (7:00) How your posture affects how you feel. (10:23) Why performance goals require more effort on skill acquisition. (15:28) Why moving optimally helps you build muscle. (16:21) How good posture comes naturally. (29:01) How to Improve Your Posture in 3 Steps. (30:54) #1 – Visit MAPS Prime Webinar and go through the 3 assessment exercises. (31:29) #2 – Pick the exercise you are the worst at and practice it daily for 10 minutes. The 2nd worst practice every other day, and the 3rd worst practice twice a week. (34:45) #3 – Modify your workout to compliment your particular posture issues. (36:08) Related Links/Products Mentioned February Promotion: Phase II Bundle Visit ChiliPad for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! Amy Cuddy: Your body language may shape who you are | TED Talk MAPS Fitness Prime - Mind Pump Media MAPS Prime Webinar Do You Have Back Or Shoulder Pain? YOU NEED TO TRY THIS! | Mind Pump How to Fix Rounded Shoulders (GONE IN 4 STEPS!) | MIND PUMP How to Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt (BECAUSE SIT HAPPENS!) | MIND PUMP The Active Plank- An 6-Pack Building Powerhouse Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You are listening to the world's number one fitness health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pup. Now, in today's episode, we talk all about your posture. Talk about why it's important to look at your posture, how to assess yourself, and what exercises you can do to correct your posture. Talk about why it's important to look at your posture, how to assess yourself and what exercises you could do to correct your posture and what that means for your progress in the gym. At the end of the episode, we actually

give you step-by-step instructions on how to do this. We actually point you to one of our webinars, that's mapsprimewebinar.com, and then we tell you how to take that information, apply it to yourself to correct your posture, get yourself to move better, thus making your exercises more effective, building more muscle, burning, more body fat. Now this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Chili. Chili makes devices that go over your bed underneath your sheets that cool your bed down or warm it up.

It's water-cooled or water- warm. So there's no EMFs It's amazing. In fact some of the products have two sides one for you and one for your partner So you could have a warmer side than your partner or vice versa. I love these products They make my sleep much much better. All of us in fact use them all the time. I got the cow king much better. All of us, in fact, use them all the time. I got the Cal King chili pad myself or Euler, I should say, I got the Euler, the one that I can control my phone. And it's amazing. Anyhow, if you go to their website, you can use our discount code and get yourself a discount. Go check them out. Go to chileatechnology.com, that's CHILItechnology.com forward slash mine pump. And then use the code pump 15 to get 15% off the chili pad or use the code pump 25 pump 25 to get 25% off the chili pad.

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Again, that's mapsfibuary.com, you can look at the programs, check it out, sign up. Again, that's mapsfibuary.com. M-A-P-S-F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y.com. Yeah, we ever didn't see me do the posture check thing that I do. It's a real simple. You put your hands by your side, you lift up, go in front, you retract, up, down, thing. No. It's like this simple little, and it's not, it's kind of like, remember when I talked, showed you guys the squat stance that where you lay on your back and you do it. It's like, oh yeah, it tells you where you should put

your feet when you squat. Yeah, it's not precise, but it's a cool way to like kind of show people like a good starting position. There's a posture-check thing that I used to do with clients all the time to get them to understand like how out of alignment they are. Because if you, over time,

if you, if you haven't been paying attention to this, a lot of people don't realize how bad of posture they have. They recognize they have aches, they have pains, they're getting older, stuff like that, but not everybody makes a connection that like, oh, I have really bad posture. Part of that's hard to see yourself. It is, and it's also part of it is it's a slow process. It's not like you go from, exactly. I like you go from good posture to bad posture

in a day. It's a slow boil and then one day you've got bad posture after 10, 15 years or whatever. And you have no idea. You know, it's funny. There are, I've seen so many different types of assessments that trainers can do for clients. And the goal of an assessment is to give a trainer,

there's a couple reasons why we do assessments. One is so we can mold and modify the way we communicate, how we'll help the person. Obviously, I'm not gonna communicate the same information to two different people who have two different types of assessments that would make no sense. And the second reason is give me a starting point. So it would be like, you know, you take your car into the mechanic and you say it's making

this knocking noise and the mechanic does nothing to check your engine and then just starts taking things apart. That would be like a trainer not doing an assessment. So assessments are part of what we would do as trainers and I've seen lots of different assessments. And one thing that's in most, if not all, assessments is a posture evaluation. I think, in fact, I can't think of a,

can you guys think of any sort of occasions you did where there wasn't a posture assessment? I think that'd be a ridiculous if we did. A lot of times they don't call it that though, right? It'll be a squat assessment or a wall test or a windmill test. I mean, a lot of times it doesn't say, like this is a posture test.

And I don't know, some trainers don't communicate that well either, that this is what we're doing is that a lot of times clients come in, they do that, or this is my experience, I should say, right. My experience with trainers working for me, giving a squat assessment on clients, they didn't always break it down correctly. It was like, oh, you want to perform a,

we need to learn how to squat better. You're not doing it well. Here's the areas that we need to work on. Not like, hey, I used to do, now me, I used to do this little posture check and then I would show them, have them do it and be like, this is the anatomical position. So I'd be standing like, all your,

you remember all your anatomy books where the skeleton is standing in this, this perfect position with their palms out or whatever. And I would explain to them that, that get them in that position and then I'd say hold that posture right there. And all of them, okay, everybody would feel be like,

oh my God, this feels weird or this is uncomfortable. And go, isn't that crazy? That perfect posture for you feels uncomfortable and weird. And that's because for so many years, you haven't been addressing this. And this is part of why we can't squat well. We can't overhead press well. You have low back pain.

Your knees bother you. Your neck bothers you. It's because of our posture is out of alignment. And all the stress is going to your joints instead of being distributed evenly through your body and carried with your muscles. Yeah, it's actually pretty interesting. Like, if I was to go back, I mean, and simplify it, like, completely, and just take somebody and,

okay, well, let's just take you up against a wall, something that's like completely vertical and flat, and can provide feedback as to what, you know, can actually touch the wall altogether. A lot of people will realize immediately whether or not they have forward head, whether or not they have, you know, protracted shoulders, whether or not they have all these things going forward, they didn't even realize because they couldn't really see themselves in that light. Yeah, you know what I like about posture assessments is it's because here's the thing, when you tell somebody to do something consciously, they're trying to do it right, but when you just tell someone to stand They stand the way that they always stand and so it tells you quite a bit, right?

So if I tell someone hey, do me a favor stand up straight Then they'll start to all of a sudden try to correct their posture We say hey, can you stand right here for a second? Just be relaxed Then I walk around you and I can see what your natural posture is and your natural posture can tell me quite a few things Now it's not gonna tell me everything, but it does tell me some stuff Some of the common things that you would see and these are things that I would see in almost everybody Which is kind of funny like what I'm gonna go over some of what we're the called posture deviations, right and

You see them at least one of them in everybody in most people and usually this more than one. One of the more common ones you you actually said protracted shoulder. That's forward shoulder. It actually sounds it looks the way that it sounds right. So your shoulders are kind of rolled forward. So that's a common posture deviation and it's probably common because we work on computers. We sit at desk, we sit in chairs all the time. And so it's one of the more common ones. Along with that, typically is forward head. That's where the head juts out.

That one's becoming much more common and worse, especially in kids. I never saw forward head in kids. And now I see it in almost every kid. And again, I think it's because they're always on their computer screens away. And that's, again, like it sounds, the head kind of juts forward.

By the way, forward shoulder typically is accompanied by neck tightness and sometimes pain in the mid-up or back, forward head, also neck tightness and strain. And sometimes headaches, you get these tension headaches because every time you move your head forward, just from the leverage it becomes much heavier and harder to support. Then you have the pelvis, right? The anterior pelvic tail, your butt. So all that affects, yeah, then it goes down the kinetic chain and you get to find problems in your hips and how they're trying to adjust to,

you know, to compensate it. Absolutely. If one thing's leaning forward, something else has to lean back to balance you out, type it. Absolutely, like if one thing's looting forward, something else has to lean back to balance you out, type of deal, right? So you have the pelvis where the butt can stick out, you have the strong arch on the back. That's an anterior pelvic tilt, then you have a posterior pelvic tilt

where the tailbone looks like it's tucked kind of underneath. And then you can look all the way down to the feet. Typically I'll have someone take their shoes off and I'll look at the feet and you'll have feet that'll either flatten, which is pronate or supinate, which is not as common, but still you'll see it sometimes, where the feet kind of turn out. All those things are telling me something about that person's body, because your body,

your joints, your spine moves through the path of least resistance. So if some muscles are weak, other areas are tight, it's gonna form and shape itself to those things. And so your posture tends to tell you that. And you can see all those, just by standing, you can see somebody in the way that they're carrying their posture just in a standing position, but then you add any sort of movement to that,

and it's really going to get exaggerated. You're going to be able to see a lot more clearly how your body is compensated by organizing itself to produce this type of movement. So you can see that in walking patterns, you can see that in squatting, you can see that in windmills, and these other types of exercises that really highlight these things. Now I want to ask you guys something early in this episode so we can address it, because I know there is, there's a big portion of the fitness communities,

especially in the strength side that doesn't quite subscribe to this as being of an, as of importance. They, their theory or idea on this is that, you know, everybody has such a different, you know, morphology that, you know, everyone's so unique that trying to address and correct and do all these little tedious movements and exercises to fix someone's posture is a waste of time. They just need to move more, squat more, deadlift more.

What do you say to that? Yeah, I've heard this argument a lot, especially being in with a lot of strength coaches too. I've noticed there's a mentality, whether or not you first get somebody and you're trying to address a lot of these, or you're trying to then cue the person through movements to get the adjustments to sharpen the actual overall movement of it,

which in my opinion has, you know, a lot of flaws in that philosophy. Yeah, I think they're going to extreme. So, yes, chasing perfect anatomical posture, like you would see in a textbook, might be silly because people are different, but we're not so different that you can't tell that somebody has bad posture and someone has good posture. We're all humans, right?

We all walk on two feet and you know what? It looks like when someone's got a hunchback to make it extreme. So it's very easy for me to say your posture's probably causing you problems. So I think it's, now here's a case that they're trying to make that this doesn't solve everything. I agree with that, it doesn't solve everything.

But it is an important piece of the puzzle. Also look at the population, the portion of population that they tend to work with. These people are working with athletes, strength athletes, and in many cases, better posture doesn't necessarily make you perform better in a sport. I'll give you an example.

If you are a boxer, you're going to train more of a forward shoulder because you're and not only that, but you're also shrugging your shoulder quite a bit, you're covering your chin, you're walking forward. If you ever watch a walk a boxer stand and move, you'll see some of that forward shoulder. Well, that benefits that particular sport. We're talking to the average person who is as no intentions of competing at a super high level in sport. This is a very important thing because posture affects how you feel. This is a fact. Number one, it affects you physically. If you have posture that's not, it's less than ideal for yourself,

leverage points change, compensations happen. And you, you start to develop, you know, the, the terminology would be like over, you know, active muscles, right? Basically what it feels like is areas get tight. Like if you have areas of your body that you tend to always get knots and you need to massage them out, it's probably because there's an imbalance there, right? If you have lots of tension in your neck or if your knee tends to bother you a particular

way, there's an imbalance there. So that's number one, there's the physical feeling of less than ideal posture that can feel kind of bad. The worst your posture is the worst at that gets. Here's the second thing. Just posture effect you emotionally. It does. Studies show that how you feel internally affects your posture. So if you're sad, if you're shy, or if you won a competition, or you lost a competition, that will all affect how you position yourself. In fact, you know, right now I could paint a picture, and we'd all imagine what this person would look like, right? Imagine an insecure teenage girl, right? Forward shoulder, hunch down, kind of covering yourself, probably wearing a sweater, hair in front of her face,

that be deal, right? So how you feel in the probably wearing a sweater, hair in front of a face, that would be all right. So how you feel in the inside affects your posture, but does your posture affect how you feel in the inside? Study, say yes also. In fact, just standing more upright sends a signal inside to the brain that says, we're feeling more energy, we're feeling more confident. Things are safer. Therefore we should start to feel better.

So when we're scared, we tend to crouch in, when we're more confident, we tend to bring things out, you know, the victory pose, that's universal among humans. Arms up above their head. It's a 20-erobins talks about the soul of time. Yes, no, what are you doing? You're exposing your weak areas, but you're showing, you know, the world essentially,

this is what the theory is, that you're confident, you're strong, right? Just doing this tells the brain that you feel confident and strong. In fact, when I would train clients, I used to love doing exercises that would correct their posture, because here's what happens when you do an exercise that corrects posture, you get improvement

in your posture right away. It's not permanent, it takes a while to make it permanent, but right away, if I activate certain muscles and loosen others up, just like if I stretch your hamstrings, you'll get some immediate flexibility, right? It goes away, but if you do it over time, it becomes permanent. But I still love doing this with clients. I would correct their posture, and it would take me 10 minutes, or I do something for a posture for 10 minutes.

And then afterwards, they'd say, how do you feel? And they'd be like, oh my God, I feel more energetic, or I feel better, or wow, I feel more open, or my shoulders feel looser. So posture, it definitely affects how you feel Yeah, well back to our you know talk about like you know the coaches that that want to kind of Adjust based off of cues in that versus like actually adjusting you know your posture and trying to eliminate a lot of the imbalances the thing about It's competing. It's performance goals require a lot more effort

on skill acquisition. In skill acquisition, you're only gonna get from repetitive patterns and really mastery of these repetitive patterns. The only thing is there's a window to that. And so as you get to this point, your body will form into this position, which then may contribute to pain and injury

further on down the road. So to add more balance to that, doesn't necessarily add to your performance, but it adds to the overall optimal health and function of the joint. Now, another hurdle that I remember having as a trainer talking to clients about posture was, what do you guys say to a client

that is so focused on building muscle or losing body fat and the fear of, if I work on posture and that's all we're doing in here's corrective exercise, like I really add them, I just wanna lose 30 pounds, or I wanna get buffed, like I don't know. It's gonna take me longer to build muscle. Right, so how do you guys respond to that? Yeah, no, it's not true.

So number one, correcting posture does involve exercise. You're still working out. You're still exercising. It actually helps me pick better exercises for your body. Obviously, fixing posture issues is going to reduce risk of injury and pain. That's a good thing. But let's just imagine that your bad posture never resulted in pain or injury, which it will.

But let's just imagine in magic land that it doesn't. Are there still benefits to working on those things? There are. Because when you can move better, you get more benefit, you get more bang for each exercise that you do. So a squat that's done properly with good stability, good control,

and a longer range of motion because you have good mobility, you have good control, is gonna give you more, generally, overall, than one that's done with a shorter range of motion with less mobility and with, you know, worst posture, if you will, or posture deviations. So you are what you're doing by working on this, is you're able to make every exercise that you do

more effective for your body. So does it build more muscle, and then does it also burn more body fat as a side effect to move better and to correct your individual posture issues or deviations? It does, it absolutely does, especially in the long term, especially in the long term. It's especially in the long term.

You talk to anybody who's been working out for a long time and you ask them, what's the number one thing that stopped you from progressing? And they'll all say, I hurt myself, or I had to stop bench pressing, or I had to stop squatting or deadlifting. I couldn't do this amazing effective exercise because of pain or whatever.

Well, I mean, how would you like to dramatically reduce the risk of that happening? So it's very important that you do this kind of stuff. It's like building a house. You've got to have a good foundation. Otherwise, yeah, you'll have a fast house that's built, but in a couple of years, it's going to be like the leaning tower of pizza. It's going to be sideways. I used to always also like to, you know, when I did that posture check, I'd love to do

it in front of a mirror. So I could show them how much better, because most people, let's be honest, come in the gym because they want to look better. Initially, what drives them in there, you know, very fewer, like, I just want to live a healthy life out of most people come in because they're insecure about the way they look and they want to change that.

Whether they know they are not, their goals are to lose body fat or build muscle to look better. And I used to love to take them and do that posture check in front of the mirror to just show them how much better I can make them look in five seconds just by getting them to stand upright and be able to explain that.

Listen, you can build all the muscle in the world on this frame or lose all the body fat from them, but if your posture sucks, it's only gonna look so good on you. But if you stand upright, you'd be surprised how good you look just from that a lot. It's a total visual cue. Yeah, it's a great point.

I remember doing that all the time and just like adjusting hips and showing some of my female clients how flat their stomach actually is. And it's just the way that they're carrying themselves and presenting themselves a lot of times that they look at themselves and they'll have this sort of deflating type of feeling by looking at that.

But it's really just like, it's such a confidence builder when you're presenting yourself with good posture. Everybody notices that. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's total visual cue. And then, you know, on the other end of this, like we all have known or seen the guy in the gym that is the meathead, builds the muscle, but has bad movement patterns, and even has bad posture.

I remember there was one guy, he used to work out one of my gyms, and he loved doing pull ups and pull downs, a lot of them. And he had an incredible lat spread, right? So he had these great massive lats, terrible upper mid back activation. And I could tell because he had such crazy forward shoulder, probably exaggerated by the fact that he was always trying

to show off his lats. But when you see him in person, move around, and we've all seen these people in the gym, they're built, but they don't move right, they don't look right. In fact, they look like the stereotype of the muscle bound type of person. So it is very much a visual cue,

and you can build a bunch of armor around bad movement patterns and bad posture. In fact, if you do that, it makes it a lot harder to correct. It's easier to fix problems when there's not all this strength that's built around bad movement patterns or bad posture. So you want to definitely make this a focus. I mean, I'll give you want to definitely make this a focus. I mean, I'll give you an example.

I had a client, I've talked about this kid a couple times. I had a client who his dad hired me to train him. By the time he came to see me, he was 17 years old, was a pitcher in high school. I mean, this kid could throw serious heat. And he brought him to me because high level colleges, we're gonna start scouting him, because he could throw so hard, so fast colleges, we're gonna start scouting him,

because he could throw so hard, so fast. But he'd been pitching for so long, it did nothing to counteract that repetitive motion, that he was so imbalanced between his two sides, it was incredible. I would have him do a row, and it was like, I mean, if I put like a divider in his back, you would think it was two different,

totally two different people. Was that causing him problems? It was, in fact, he would think it was two different, totally two different people. Was that causing him problems? It was. In fact, he would continuously injure himself because of it. One of the reasons why he brought him to me was because he kept hurting himself. When I did the assessment, I was like,

holy cow, we have a lot of work that we need to do. Now, how he started with some of this stuff through that career of pitching, would he ever run into those problems? No, I don't think so, not at all. Some of my favorite clients to help with posture stuff is, many times I would get a guy who is middle-aged and wants to build a physique and wants to build his chest, but has shoulder surgery or has shoulder issues, and so has completely, I could void a chest, and so I would get this question

of, you know, Adam, I have this going on with my shoulder, and so I can't bench press, I can't do this, I can't do all these movements, but I want to build a chest, what do I do? And, you know, Adam, I have this going on with my shoulder. And so I can't bench press, I can't do this, I can't do all these movements, but I want to build a chest. What do I do? And, you know, helping them. And a lot of times when you have either had surgery there or had an issue and injury, why people can no longer do things like bench press, isn't because the shoulder no longer works. It's just not in an optimal position. They haven't addressed it.

Or when they went through their rehab, they didn't finish the work that they should have finished off and got them back into proper alignment so that the shoulder tracks correctly when they do a bench press. So just getting that client to get their shoulder in the optimal position to where they could bench press again would change everything for them. I loved helping people with shoulder stuff. Yeah, so look at, think of any kind of kind of machinery that's got a track on it. You could even think of like a sliding glass door.

If it's lined up perfectly that slider, that track is gonna last a long time. Now, if it's off balance, if it's pushing in one direction, if the hinges or whatever the track is a lot off, it's gonna wear that track down very quickly. Now you could grease the hell out of it. You could, you know, every other day go down there, spray some WD-40 with it,

but over it, it's gonna just continue to chew up that track because it's applying pressure in a way that, essentially it's not being used optimally or it's not moving optimally. This is your body, right? So your joints have optimal ways of moving. They also, and anything outside of that is considered suboptimal.

Now, if you do repetitive motions in a suboptimal way, like you do a lot of bench press or rows or overhead presses or whatever, and the joint is not moving in an optimal way, it's just gonna start to cause problems. And even before it causes problems, your body actually limits the amount of strength that will build because your body actually has these kind of safety mechanisms in place where it, in fact, studies show that high-level Olympic weightlifters are able to generate

more force within their muscles than people who don't practice. You get stronger. It's a performance enhancement. And I've actually tried to go more in that direction when I talk about posture and mobility. Because of a lot of the athletes that I've talked to and discussed, and a lot of this pre-requisite stuff is just not attractive.

It's not like the flashy movements, the explosive type movements, but it actually is way more of contributing towards their performance long term if they really apply these concepts, then these explosive strength moves that they could in their training program. Well, speaking to performance, the other thing,

I know when you talk about posture, a lot of times right away I think people think old and joint pain and issues, but I love that you go the performance direction, because the other client that I used to love old and joint pain and issues, but I love that you go the performance direction because the other client that I used to love to help is my female client who comes in and does squats, does deadlifts, does all these movements they're supposed to do to build their butt

and they can't build their butt. And it's because they're posture is that online. You have, they have a lot of times, they have this excessive anterior pelvic tilt, so they're carrying their weight on their quads and their hip flexors. The hip flexors are shortened and tight. So when they go down into a squatted position, their chest falls forward more than normal because they'll tighten their hip flexors are.

They're quad dominant. They're used to using the quads when they walk around and move all time and not the glutes as much as they should. So that those muscles, because they've trained them that way, because of their posture, takes over a movement that we think is for the glute. We tell everybody to squat and deadlift because it's a great glute exercise, but it's not if you have poor posture down there. If you have this excessive anterior pelvic tilt and you've trained the body to be quad dominant, when you go to do exercises that are supposed to be for the butt, many times you won't feel

it there for this exact reason. And that's what unlocks this, is teaching that client that here's your postural deviation that you have going on. These are the exercises that we need to work on to address it. If we do a good job doing that, then when you go over and you do the squatting and the deadlifting those movements, now you'll start to see your butts firing better. Yeah, absolutely. It allows you to connect to your muscles more effectively.

Again, it makes your exercises much more effective. How big of a deal is this? It's a big deal, okay? A barbell squat, for example, one of the most effective exercises you can do for the lower body, generally speaking, that can range from, it's gonna hurt you to, it's gonna make you mobile, mobile strong build great muscle burn body fat

That's the range now you can be somewhere in the middle you can be getting some of the benefits of the squat But really not all of it because your movement patterns aren't very good because your posture is bad But why not make all your exercises much more effective and this is again This is a huge deal. It's like you're gonna get twice as good of results and feel twice as good just by focusing on correcting some of this, your posture issues. I mean, keep in mind, your posture is what you're dealing with every single day. It's unconscious, right?

You're standing, you're sitting, you're talking to people. Your posture is how you hold yourself. You form into your patterns. You do. And so it's a very important thing to look at, to assess, and then kind of read the clues and then go from there and, you know, strengthen what's weak, right? So again, I'll give you a simple example, right? So we talked about forward shoulder, very common. I like talking about that one because it's easy to envision. So if you're listening or

watching this podcast, you could easily picture somebody with shoulders that round forward. Usually this means that the person needs to strengthen the muscles that pull the shoulders back and maybe even drop the shoulders, right? So, rhomboids, mid-repiseus, those are some of the muscles we wanna work on. So, now if somebody goes and does a row, theoretically they should be able to work those muscles.

But what if somebody goes and does a row, but doesn should be able to work those muscles. But what if somebody goes and does a row, but doesn't know how to activate those muscles properly or just goes and does the row and they're lat dominant or whatever? What's it gonna do? It's gonna actually make their posture worse. So this is why it's important to see this kind of stuff, pay attention to form a technique,

do the exercise in a way that benefits you specifically because exercises can be done wrong and they can be done properly. You can get great benefit from them or you can actually hurt yourself. Again, posture is one piece of the puzzle, but it's a great one. And it's one that you can do with and look at for most people.

Well, so let's, I mean, what would you do as far as first steps? You have somebody who's listening right now, okay, the message received. I've never really done an assessment on my posture. I've never looked into this. I've just been kind of working out. Yes, I probably have some aches and pains. Yes, I probably have some stuff.

But where do I start? Well, before we get into that, because I do want to give them takeaways, right? I want to give people like step-by-step, here's what you can do. But before I do, I want to address one thing, because I get a lot of messages on this. Do you guys get messages on posture correcting devices?

Oh, yeah. You're just like the reverse bra, like they wear around the shoulders, but it pulls it back or. Or it's like a little electric stim that's in between the shoulder blades, just to kind of let you know that your shoulder blades are a little too far apart.

Yeah, reminds people or whatever. Just to pull back. Yeah, there's a lot of divide, or there's the lumbar support in your chair. Oh, if I use this, I Yeah, reminds people or whatever. Just to pull back. Yeah, there's a lot of divide over there's like the lumbar support in your chair. Oh, if I use this, I'll sit up, you know, tall or whatever. Two things, one, good posture is unconscious, unless you feel like thinking about your posture all day long,

which I don't think anybody, it'd be like thinking about blinking, like, in fact, I just said that right now. I'm breathing, I'm breathing right now. Yeah, it won't work that way. So good posture has to be natural. It can't be something that you have to think about all the time. It just won't work.

The other thing to keep in mind with posture correcting devices is if something is holding you in place, then you are not holding yourself in place. That's right. So if I have something... So it might give you temporary relief on pain, but it's not addressing the root cause. Not only that, but I'll get weaker.

If I have something holding my shoulders back for me, placing, forcing me in proper posture, all the muscles that are supposed to do that, they're going to turn off. They're going to take an even more. And I'm going to atrophy even more. I mean, if you've ever had a cast, this is an extreme example, but if you've ever had a cast on your arm or leg and you take it off in two or three weeks, you see that muscle loss.

Well, to a smaller degree, this is what you're doing when you're wearing things that puts you in the position you wanna be in. All the muscles that are supposed to do that, now they get even more turned off, and you cause even more problems. So those posture correcting devices in the short term might make you feel better in the long term or terrible. I never recommend these to anybody.

So I just wanted to address that because I get messages from people. I put this on, it feels great. And I'm like, don't wear it. Don't wear it anymore because it's going to make things waste of money. Absolutely. All right, so let's go step by step. Now, normally, a posture assessment is literally, you look at yourself standing from the front,

from the side, from the back, your barefoot. Here's a problem with it. There's a lot of things to look at. And in fact, we ran into this problem years ago when we designed one of our program's maps prime. It was like, do we put this kind of assessment in there? And we thought, well, it's gonna be tough because the average person really isn't quite sure

of how to read these types of things. It'd be better if we put tests together for people to follow. So here's what we did. This is your first step. Go to mapsprimewebinar.com. It's totally free. And what you're gonna do is you'll see Justin. So Justin's in there, and he's taking Doug our producer

through three tests that will tell you quite a bit about your imbalances, deviations, how your body moves. The three tests are, there's a wall test. So we're standing up against the wall. There's different points of contact and you're actually sliding your hands up in the wall and down the wall. It'll tell you a lot about your upper back, your shoulders, your neck, even tells you

a little bit about your lower back. So you do that test. Then there's a windmill test, which tells you more about your spine, your lumbar spine, how you hip hinge. So stuff that has to do with your hips. Can you rotate? Can you twist?

Then there's a squat assessment that you do. And what you do is when you go on, and the reason why I want you to go to mapsprimewebinar.com is because you need to watch, just then, and listen to to him tell you what to look out for because he's literally going to coach you through your own self assessment. So once you do this, and it's great, it's invaluable. This is interactive.

So make sure that yeah, you can pause it, you know, do whatever you got to do, but try it your best to perform this with Doug. Right. And then what you'll find is out of these three tests, one of them is gonna be worse than the others. You might suck at all three of them, a lot of people do, but one of them is gonna be like, I can't even get my body to move that way,

or it looks way different than what you explained. Take that worst test and then practice it every single day. By practicing it every single day, you're going to work on the areas you need to work on to correct some of your posture issues and to correct some of your movement issues. And keep in mind that the test is actually an exercise too. That's what I mean. So like, you know, you might think, oh, well, then what am I supposed to do to fix this? That's what you're doing by practicing the test and you'll see when you go through the webinar

with Justin, he teaches you the intent of the movement so I can't stress that enough how important that piece to all this is like if you just go this and this is my My biggest pet peeve with seeing people do stretches like when you do stretches and you and you stretch to what's Comfortable to you and then you just kind of let go of the stretch and go back You're not really correcting or fixing anything. You're doing what's comfortable the body. When you can't do a movement and you can't perform it correctly, there's going to be an uncomfortable piece to this and that's the intent of the movement by trying to get a greater

range of motion and just in talks you through that webinar. If you do this correctly, these three little exercises won't feel so little, it'll be work. You know, a lot of times if you're doing this really well, you do a few sets of each one of these movements, you should actually start getting sweat running down your face from it because it should be intense like that. It's a workout and you're trying to activate muscles. You're not just trying to, like what Adam said, stretching. Stretching does increase. Yes, it increases range of motion, but it isn't connecting you to that new range of motion. What you need is ranges of motion that you can

connect to, that you control. So when you're doing these movements and you're practicing them, you're practicing them like you would an exercise. You're connecting, you're putting yourself in position, your muscles are turned on. There's nothing passive about this, and it is a little bit of a workout. So pick the one that you sucked the most at, and you'll know, it'll be quite obvious. That one you should practice at least once every single day for about 10 minutes, okay? Just practice 10 minutes every single day if you practice it twice a day, even better. Now, you might want to, you might be asking why, so frequent. When you're trying to change a movement pattern, frequency is

king. When you're trying to build muscle, frequency is important, but you need because of the intensity and volume that you're trying to build muscle, you need to have days off and between for rest. With this, you're practicing often because you're trying to get the muscles to move and connect the way that you want. It's a new pattern. Keep that in mind. So to give you another example, think of the way you walk. You don't even think about it. actually, you just walk, it's very natural. If I told you to walk differently, you would have to think about the new way of walking

quite a bit, but once you practice it enough, it might become your new default pattern. It would become something that's quite natural. That's what we're trying to do with these tests. So that's why you pick the worst one and you practice it every single day. Now the one that was not as sucky is that worst one, but still you're second, I'd say second worst,

practice this one every other day. So you have the one that you do every day, now you've got the one that you practice every other day. And then the third test, the one that you were the best at, just practice that twice a week. So there's your routine right there that should help you work on your individual problems and movement issues.

And then step number three, yeah, you got to talk about how we design what we call fortification sessions, which we built those into Maps Prime and they are designed to complement these tests. Right, so step three would be to modify your workout to complement your particular posture issues. So to stick to the example of forward shoulder,

if the shoulders are rolling forward, you're going to want to practice exercises that pull the shoulders back, right? So like a cable row, a band row, a barbell row, dumbbell row, but really focus on the part that you need to focus on, which is the pulling the shoulders back part. This means you're going to have to go lighter, slow down and focus on, which is the pulling the shoulders back part. This means you're gonna have to go lighter, slow down,

and focus on the squeeze. You can't, if you're trying to correct something and you go heavy, not gonna happen, because the second you go heavy, that's when your body's gonna revert back to what it always does, what it does best, which is moving away that you wanna change. You're correct.

It also means too, you should do those movements before you do the ones that could potentially make that issue worse. And we'll stick with the forward shoulder example. So when I ever had a client that had excessive forward shoulder, which was most, I would never start their workout with a bench press. I would always go do either priming movements before the workout or at least do things like seated row or work the back muscles.

Before I go do an exercise, that's going to train all the muscles that are already tight in that person. So when you start to get that understanding of what muscles are tight in your body, which ones are underactive or weak, start with the weaker muscles in your workout and strengthen those, wake those up,

get a good pump in those, before you go to any exercises that may potentially make that issue worse. Right, so this means you can take some exercises out of your workout. This means you can leave them at the end of the workout so that you're focusing on things you don't need to focus on. But essentially what you're doing is you're taking your,

you're doing those other movements every single day, right? The 10 minutes a day or whatever. But then when you get to your regular workout, you're still not taking your focus off this. You're just doing your workout, but now pointing a lot of the exercises in the direction of correcting your posture. To use in one of the other deviations

in anterior pelvic tilt, this is where the person's, you know, low back excessively arches their butt, sticks out like the Instagram model pose or whatever. You would do like a reverse crunch or you would do a plank where you tuck the tailbone, you do the opposite of anterior pelvic tilt, just to strengthen the opposite side of that, right?

To correct the posture. Essentially what you're doing is it's like you're moving too far in one direction, you gotta strengthen the opposite direction to get it to move in that direction. And then you start to achieve some balance. If you do this, you should see your body progress, you should feel progression almost right away. You should

feel good right away. You and you should, if you're doing a good job with this, instantly you should see a difference. If you weren't doing it before, right? If you weren't addressing posture, you weren't doing these movements before and you added it now, you should, and I recommend you test this. So how would I test that with like forward shoulder? Well, let's say someone's never really paid attention to this up until this podcast episode. And so before you decide to go do incline or flat bench tomorrow or the next day, what on the next day you're going to do chest and you think that you might have a little bit of forward shoulders, go do exactly what we said.

Go do three, four sets of seated row. First, before you go into your bench and tell me if you feel a difference when of four shoulders, go do exactly what we said. Go do three, four sets of seated row first before you go into your bench and tell me if you feel a difference when you go bench, you should notice a difference. If you're somebody who has that excessive arch and you're low back, the anterior pelvic tip that's sticking the butt out,

go do floor breaches for three sets before you do that or go do the active plank that Sal is talking about and then go do squats or deadlifts and tell me if you notice a difference. If you've never done that and you've never applied this before, you should already start to feel progress on the very first time you do it. Wait, it'll feel like, is it'll feel like exercises that usually took you longer, you know, a few sets to warm up or that feel kind of like

they have sticking points, all of a sudden feel a lot better. Some cases you actually are stronger. Yes. Yeah, in some cases, I've actually had some male clients who wanted to increase their bench press, and all we did was prime their upper back properly, and then I had a bench press and they added a rep, you know, like a rep or two to their max. I mean, I noticed that for myself.

That was the first thing I noticed with was, and here's why, when you bench press. It speaks to stability. Yeah, and when you bench press, if you have excessive foreshoulder, like so many people do, the shoulder and the arms, the triceps, take over the movement,

and the chest is a much bigger, stronger muscle. So that's a lot of times why they fatigue out. They fatigue out because the arms and shoulders fatigue out. They weren't even getting a lot of the chest in the movement By priming the upper back really well and then going in it the chest is taking the load like it's supposed to It's a bigger stronger muscle all the sudden they get another rep out or can add five or ten pounds exactly So when you practice this you should notice

Almost immediately you feel better and maybe even get stronger after a couple weeks of doing this You should also notice that you're getting stronger. That's becomes much more common. So just to recap the steps that you can do, first go to mapsprimewebinar.com and then follow along and take the tests just and literally coaches you through in the video, again, it's totally free. Then pick the tests that you did the worst at

and practice that one every single day for 10 minutes or so, every day, the one that you did, second worst at, practice that one every other day, and then the test that you did the best at, that's the one that you practice twice a week. The third step, modify your workouts to complement your posture. And those exercises that you do to correct your posture

in your workouts, you gotta go light and you gotta slow down and you gotta focus on the squeeze. I can't stress this enough. If you add, if you have forward shoulder, for example, we'll stick to that one, right? You have forward shoulder and you're doing heavy rows. I guarantee you, your shoulders are gonna remain forward with those heavy rows.

You're gonna do the exercise in the way that you do it best, which is the way that you've always done it with your forward shoulder. You've got to go light, you've got to slow down, and you've got to really, really squeeze. Look, if you want more free information from Mind Pump, we have a lot of guides you can check out. Go to mindpumpfree.com. You can also find all of us individually on social media, or on Instagram. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin

You can find me at Mind Pump Salon at Mind Pump Adam. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump If your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance Check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pump Media dot com The RGB Superbundle includes maps and a ballad, maps performance and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints in over 200 videos, The RGB Superbundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money bag guarantee and you can get it

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