I often work long days at my desk and I don't exercise enough and so I struggle to sit upright.

But recently I spoke to health expert and fitness coach Dan Goh about how anyone can have perfect posture and what perfect posture actually means.

So there's a big myth around posture.

So we first talk about the biggest myth around posture and then we go through the three key exercises you can do to improve your posture.

Oh, and by the way, if you're new here, hi, my name is Ali.

I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and writer and the author of Feel Good Productivity, which is about how to be more productive in a way that feels good.

But let's dive into this posture stuff.

So the myth of posture is the fact that there is a perfect posture in the first place.

There's two types of posture that people usually talk about, which is number one is gonna be sitting and the other one is gonna be standing.

So when it comes to sitting, everyone thinks that, oh my gosh, like you have to stand with your shoulder blades back and you have to be like perfectly tight.

You have to have something stuck up your butt so you kind of like remain in that position and the string has to be pulling your neck this way.

But what we're seeing with a lot of studies is the fact that the next posture that you're in is the best one.

The one that you're most comfortable in is the best one.

And usually what that means is, it means like switching up the way in which you're sitting every like 15 to 20 minutes.

All right, so there's this quote that says, your best posture is your next posture.

And this goes against a lot of what we see online in the health space and even what we're told by some doctors.

So we're told to sit up straight or stand up straight and not to slouch our CC and have like our shoulders back and our chest out.

And we're told this not because the science says that this is the right thing to do, but because it looks good or because some people say it helps prevent things like lower back pain.

Now, when it comes to standing, the myth is that you have to stand straight all the time and your shoulder blades have to be back and your chest has to be high and your back has to be like activated.

When it comes to standing, what we're looking for is the aesthetic of what good posture looks like.

The truth is that everyone is gonna have a different look to how they stand.

So it really seems like we need to change the way that we think about posture.

So this is a paper published in the Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy and it's titled, Sit Up Straight, Time to Re-evaluate.

And here are some of the key takeaways from that paper.

So firstly, there is no single correct posture and this makes sense because we're all different shapes and sizes and our spines curve differently.

So one size fits all approach just isn't logical.

Secondly, you should adopt more comfortable postures and this may well involve sitting with a slight slouch on your sofa or at your desk if that feels more comfortable.

Thirdly, we need to remember that the spine is robust and can be trusted.

And fourthly, moving and changing position can be helpful.

So like Dan said, small adjustments every 15 minutes or so is pretty good.

And we often do this without even thinking about it because it feels totally normal.

And if you think about it, staying in one rigid upright position is actually kind of painful and can actually worsen lower back pain because you're not able to relax your muscles.

I was also quite surprised to hear from Dan that good posture doesn't actually correlate with athletic performance.

Does good posture actually relate to having some sort of like performance benefit?

And I'm gonna say, no, it doesn't.

It's largely the aesthetic thing, at least from what we're seeing in the evidence.

So what people want is this look of aesthetically looking like you have good posture, which allows you to be taller, it gives you an extra inch of height.

But in reality, it's like everyone has different posture.

And it doesn't mean that because they may look a little bit more like hunched back than others, that they perform worse.

You might actually find that performance is gonna differ between people who have different types of posture.

And everyone's body is different.

That's the thing that we have to realize.

So the key takeaway from Dan and also from these papers is that there is no such thing as the perfect posture.

It is more about how you feel.

But this does not mean that there aren't things that we can do to improve our posture from an aesthetic perspective.

And so in the next part of this video, we're gonna look at what Dan feels are the three best exercises that we can all do to improve our posture.

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All right, so exercise number one is all about grip strength.

And this little device is called a hand dynamometer.

And basically you just squeeze it as hard as you possibly can and it measures your grip strength.

And this graph, for example, shows how your grip strength changes over time as we get older.

For both males and females, our grip strength is at its best when we're in our thirties and forties, which is pretty cool for me as I've just turned 30.

And so I was very curious to hear from Dan about how I can improve my grip strength.

There are actually three great exercises that you can do in order to improve your posture.

Number one is going to be bar hangs.

And I'm not talking about hanging at the bar with your friends or what we did yesterday, but it's literally just getting like a pull-up bar and just hanging from it.

And there are two ways to do bar hangs.

There's the passive way, where you're just hanging from a bar and allowing kind of like your lats to stretch, you're allowing your spine to decompress.

And then there's what's called the active hang, which is where you're hanging on from a bar, but then you're also getting yourself into what we call like proper posture, which is like pulling your shoulder blades back and activating your upper back.

And then that is the more advanced way of doing a bar hang.

That's gonna help activate your upper back, is gonna pull your shoulder blades back, and it's going to help you achieve that look of good posture when you're standing.

Now, the really cool thing here is that grip strength is an excellent indicator of overall health, including our risk of things like diabetes and dementia and even in some studies, longevity, which is kind of weird, right?

Like why would the strength with which you can grip a thing correlate with all these different health outcomes?

But according to some of the research, grip strength is now considered a biomarker of aging.

And this study from 2022 was the first to show that people with weaker grip strength age at a faster rate compared to people with a stronger grip.

And they did this by comparing your chronological age.

So that's just the number that you can see along the X-axis.

And we compared that with biological age, which was estimated using a technique called DNA methylation.

There'll be a link to the source down below if you wanna check it out, we're not gonna go into it.

Now, this is what the line looks like for stronger grip strength.

And this is what the line looks like for weaker grip strength.

And the difference between these two lines is essentially the difference in your rate of aging.

So if you have a weaker grip strength over time as your chronological age increases, i.e. as you become older, your biological age actually increases more compared to if you have a stronger grip strength.

Now, something else that's really interesting is that grip strength is an easy way to get an insight into your overall muscle strength.

So that's the strength of basically in the rest of your body.

For example, this study looked to see if there was a correlation between grip strength relative to your body size and lower back pain.

And when they controlled for things like age and sex and smoking and physical activity and things like that, they found that weak grip strength increases your risk of lower back pain compared to people with a strong grip.

So if you have good grip strength, then it has a bunch of different benefits.

Firstly, you increase your chances of living longer and decrease your risk of various diseases, or at least it's correlated in that way.

Secondly, you're more likely to have a stronger upper body, stronger back and stronger body overall.

Thirdly, you are less likely to develop back pain because you're strengthening all the muscles around to support your back in theory.

And fourthly, you improve your posture as a result of all of the above.

So with the bar hang, one of the main things that it's doing is it is stretching out your lats.

The other thing that it's doing is also decompressing your spine.

So a lot of times when people have poor posture, it is due to the fact that their lower back feels very sore or the fact that they're feeling pain in the lower back.

So they're kind of like hunched over.

So through hanging from a bar, you're just employing gravity to your advantage.

And gravity is just allowing your spine to decompress as you're hanging from that bar.

Now, this is how Dan suggests we can start getting better at bar hangs.

When it comes to the bar hangs for beginners, especially for people who can't necessarily hold themselves up, the thing I like to do with them is I like them to hang from a bar, but also to have their feet lightly touching a surface just to make sure that they are giving themselves enough grip onto the bar where it's challenging enough, but not to the point where they can't grip the bar at all.

So beginners should be aiming for anywhere between 30, I would say 15 to 30 seconds of the bar hang.

For people who are a little bit more advanced, you should be aiming for one minute.

And if you really want to be elite at a bar hang, you want to be aiming for at least like two minutes.

Now, for me personally, I can just about bar hang for about one minute, but I'm aiming for 90 seconds and slowly inching that up over time.

And I'm finding I'm getting calluses in my hands, but like apparently it's good for me.

You should be doing bar hangs.

I would say it's like probably one of the best things to do is like every single day.

Yeah, doing a bar hang every day.

If you can't do a bar hang every day, do it like three times a week.

If you can't do it three times a week, then do it once a week.

And if you're anything like me and you like seeing numbers go up over time, it's a nice thing.

It gives us a feeling of progress.

Progress feels good.

It's one of the whole philosophies of field of productivity.

Find a way to experience progress.

So I like tracking my bar hang numbers over time.

And the app I use for that is Strong.

No affiliation, no paid partnership.

I just think it's a cool app.

All right, so exercise number two is all to do with our glutes.

So one of the things that people don't realize about posture is a lot about how strong your glutes are.

So when your glutes are strong, what happens is is that you're able to stand tall.

Your glutes are able to actually do a lot of the movements for you, whether it becomes standing or walking.

The glutes are supposed to be the second most powerful muscle in your body.

The first one is gonna be your jaw.

But in a lot of people, especially when they sit down for long periods of time, their glutes, they don't necessarily turn off, but they just get more weak.

They atrophy over the course of sitting, over the course of modern life where it requires us to sit for anywhere between six to eight hours a day.

So one of the things that we wanna do is we wanna activate those glutes.

Now, one of the first things you can do to start working on your glutes is an exercise that doesn't need any fancy equipment at the gym, and it's something you can just do at home on the floor.

If you're a complete beginner and you don't have access to a barbell, then glute bridges are gonna be fantastic.

I love to do this thing called glute bridge holds, and it's where you are doing glute bridge, but you're also holding it for about anywhere between five to 10 seconds.

What that does is it helps increase the amount of glute endurance or muscular endurance that you have, and that's one of the ways in which to start activating the glutes.

All right, so Dan got me to do this glute bridge test, which tests how strong your glutes are in the first place.

So you do 15 glute bridges and you assess where you feel the strain.

Is it in your glutes or is it in your quads or your hamstrings?

So if you're feeling this exercise in anywhere but the glutes, you can actually say that your supporting muscles are doing some of the work outside of the glutes being the main muscle that you wanna activate.

Now, what I find is with a lot of clients when they're doing something like this, they are actually finding that the quadriceps are getting strained before the glutes do.

And to me, that is a sign that their glutes are significantly weaker than their quadriceps, which is not what you want to have happen.

So I asked Dan, how often should I be doing these glute bridges?

I like to do those glute bridges every single morning upon waking.

And the reason I like to do that is because number one, it's just going to remind my glutes to actually activate in the first place.