Relieve Pain in Lower Back with Exercises to Improve Posture
|Posture is one of the key elements with any type of exercise whether functional or traditional.
Here’s why: when the spine is straight with proper alignment then all of the joints of the area that you are working can move and function better.
If posture is poor, it just spreads the stress the exercise creates over the muscles AND the joints because now everything is out of alignment.
This is not a new concept. Hippocrates, regarded as the Father of Medicine, said that one of the gauges of person’s health status would be to look to the spine. If a person had good posture, then for the most part, it was an indicator of good health. If they had bad posture, it would be an indicator of bad health for many different reasons from a muscular standpoint but also from a neuro-muscular standpoint.
From the muscular standpoint, it would be just that the muscles were weaker or maybe too tight and then causing abnormal “pull” within the vertebrae distorting the alignment and causing poor posture. The cause could be because of lack of exercise or maybe too much exercise with the wrong movements creating those imbalances.
When I say neuro-muscular, I am referring to the fact that if the vertebrae are “out of position” the central nervous system (CNS) which is comprised of the brain and the spinal cord, can cause an impingement therefore affecting or “interrupting” the nerve impulses going to that particular area of the body.
The CNS is part of the main “control center” which controls everything within your body whether it’s your internal organs, your muscles, your heart, lungs, everything.
So what are some exercises to improve posture?
Well, it depends on the kind of distortion that you have. The typical distortions in case number one, Upper Crossed Syndrome, are a rounded upper back, rounded forward shoulders and an excessive curvature in the lower back. That would typically indicate weak muscles in between your shoulder blades which would be the mid-trapezius, the rhomboids and your rear deltoid muscles along with some excessive tightness in the lumbar area in the spinal erectors of the lumbar area.
The solution? Stretch the lumbar muscles and then strengthen the overly stretched out upper back.
Case number two of a typical imbalance would be a rounded lower back still with a rounded upper back as well.
So what to we do there? With the rounded upper back, still the same thing. We strengthen the upper body muscles in between the blades, the mid-trapezius and lower trapezius along with the rhomboids along with your external rotators and your rear deltoids.
With the lower back though, what we want to do is strengthen it with some hyperextensions and core stabilization movements on the floor such as the quadruped superman exercises.
Improving the posture is key because you have to make sure that your spine is stable and that your posture is maintained with practically ANY exercise you perform.
That way the muscles you are exercising would be able to work better and maximize the effect of that exercise on the area you are targeting making your training much more productive and also much safer.
