Today I'm going to show you in five simple steps how you can start fixing your posture

once and for all. You see, it's not that you haven't been trying in the past, but I'm telling

you, you've probably been trying the wrong things because a lot of people mean well,

but they're not telling you the right cues and the right things to focus on.

It's getting you either looking really strange walking around, or more frustrated because

you can't fix anything long term. Here's what you have to do: you've got to start focusing

on the things that you can change. The first thing you need to do is stand up, get yourself

in the mirror and turn sideways because you want to look at the angle of your neck first.

Now, a lot of us will tell you that you have to tuck your chin in, you've got to do 'this'.

That's awkward. That's not going to – you're going to walk around like this. It's not really

fixing what you're trying to fix. If you look at the angle of your neck – and I'm talking

about this portion, from here to here – what is it doing? Is it tilted forward?

If it's tilted forward at all here you're not talking about the angle that you want.

The angle that you want is going to be almost vertical here and perpendicular to the ceiling.

What happens is, when the angle of your neck is there, it actually puts your chin and the

rest of your head in a nice carrying position. Instead of having to worry about having to

pull your chin backing in.

What happens is, we do get misguided and think that we're in the right position because even

when we're forward, our bodies are smart enough to make sure that our eyes are pointed forward

so we lift up. If you looked in the mirror you'd quickly see that's what going on. So

fix the neck. Then we can move down to the next segment here and it's in the shoulder

girdle. Again, what's the advice you've been given?

It's "Pinch your shoulder blades together," or "Roll your shoulders back." The problem

is you walk around like a chicken that way because you're not really fixing what you're

supposed to be fixing. What you can do alternatively, in a much easier, more effective way, is focus

right here on the sternum. This bone here in your chest isn't going anywhere, but it's

controlling your ribcage position.

Your ribcage is obviously controlling your shoulder blade position because they're attached

to it. So what you want to do is focus on the position of the top portion, right here,

of your sternum. Is it angled down at all? I can guarantee if you have forward shoulders

then it's not going to be angled down like you see here. You can fix that by lifting

your sternum and trying to get the top of it – think of it as a glass of water.

Is it pouring out forward at all, or can you get it perfectly straight? You can do that

by lifting your sternum up, but look what happens when we do that. That's so easy to

control, but when we do that the shoulders go, what? Back and down. They're in the perfect

position, just by fixing the position of our sternum. So now you're 2/5 of the way there.

Let's keep it going. As we work our down to the kinetic chain we have to always pass through

the core.

That's a good thing because your core is something that you need to help you to stabilize the

position in the proper position that you've already established up above. Remember, this

is one continuous spine from your neck to in between your shoulder blades, in through

your thoracic spine, now down into your lumbar spine. Well, we can control that and stabilize

that by having some contraction of the core. Now I'm not talking about flexing.

That's all going to pull down and create actual spinal flexion. That wouldn’t help us. I'

talking about creating and engagement here of your core and getting better at being able

to do that throughout the entire day. you can do that and talk and you can do that and

do whatever else you're doing by increasing the tone of your abs. the resting tone of

your abs. again, you're getting the stability. So now, here you are, your chest is up, your

neck's in the right position, stabilized by getting a little bit of a contraction of your

core.

You're not flexing, but contracting. Work your way down the chain now. Now we're into

the pelvis. Here's the problem. Again, most of us sit all day long. We work, we drive;

whatever it is. We have the anterior tilt of the pelvis that happens because the hip

flexors get tight from all the sitting that we do. As they pull down they get us into

this anterior tilt like you see here. We can fix that very, very easily, but just contracting

our gluts. Squeeze your butt cheeks together as hard as you can and guess what?

You just put yourself into more of a posterior tilt. You might be in a perfectly neutral

position, but you're going from an anterior position to a more posterior position by contracting

your gluts. Keep that going with the contraction of your abs and you've got a nice co-contraction

and you just stabilized the pelvis and put it in the right spot by having both of those

areas contracted together. Now finally, check out the position of your knees. I can pretty

much guarantee you've got some flexion going on in your knees, you've got a little bit

of bend going on in your knees, and you didn't even realize it.

Here's the coup de gras to bring it all together; straighten the knees. Contract your quads.

You can see now that the entire posture from the top down has been fixed in just five,

easy to manipulate areas. You can easily change the degree of flexion in your knees. You can

easily change the contraction going on in your gluts by just actively squeezing them

together. You can easily engage your abs more than you are right now. You can easily tilt

your sternum up if it's pointing down, and you can easily change the position of your

neck without having to worry about all these crazy, weird things.

It's not that hard to do, but now I'm going to tell you how to keep it there because if

you can't keep it there, what's the point in the first place? You can keep it there

by using this one drill that I do. It's sort of like this Cam Newton Superman drill, believe

it or not. What you do is you take a band, you wrap it around – don’t' worry you're

not going to suffocate yourself, or constrict yourself too much. You wrap around from the

front to the back and you bring the bands in front of you. You grab the left one with

the right hand, the right one with the left hand, and you get your hands in position right

here in front of your chest.

Now, here – remember Cam Newton pull out – open to Superman chest, this way, reveal

your "S"; we're going to do the same thing. You're going to take it from here, you're

going to pull out and rotate. So here, now what I've done is I automatically find that

because the band is across my low back it's pulling me into this nice, upright posture.

From here, my shoulder blades are going down and back because the sternum is coming up.

Here I've got external rotation on the shoulders because my bands are coming out and back and

thumbs are pointing toward the back.

Of course, I focus on keeping the core contracted beneath the bands, I got my butt squeezed

together to get the gluts going to make sure that pelvis is in the right position and I've

got my knees nice and straight and all I did was hold this here for as long as I can. If

I could hold it for one or two minutes, great. If I find that I'm fatiguing and losing the

right changes that I've incorporated here then I might want to relax and do it again.

The idea is, once you've done that, take it out, come back here, and stand. Then you'll

see that it's way easier for your to maintain that position because most of the time these

areas that we're trying to change here are just dormant.

They're just waiting to be woken up. If you do this a couple times a day – and I mean

literally a couple times – you could do it for a minute or two, good. Do it once or

twice a day you will see incredibly fast changes, like I said, we were talking about tapping

into areas that you never knew how to control before. By just doing it in a different way

you're finally able to control the muscles to make some really quick changes here and

be able to maintain a much better posture without having to think about it. Try these.

Its' very, very simple and I want you to tell me how it works for you.

In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that doesn't just tell you "This is how it

works," but shows you how to do it step by step so you understand, number one – because

when you understand you're much more capable of doing things much more quickly – I do

that for you. I try to break it down for you step by step. It's the ATHLEANX training program.

You can get it over at ATHLEANX.com. I hope this one helped you out. Make sure you let

me know below. Leave your comments and a thumbs up and let me know what else you want me to

cover here on this channel and I'll do my best to do that in the days and weeks ahead.

I'll see you back here soon.