The Science of Posture: Myths and Effective Exercises

Strengthening grip, glutes, and core enhances posture and overall health, debunking perfect posture myths.

### Understanding Posture: Myths, Strength, and Practical Exercises
* 🤔 The concept of a "**perfect posture**" is a myth; instead, everyone has different postures that suit their **unique body shapes and sizes**.
* 💪 Engaging in bar hangs can enhance grip strength, which is linked to **overall health**, including risks of **diabetes and dementia**, and even **longevity**.
* 📉 A recent study indicates that grip strength serves as a biomarker for aging, showing that those with **weaker grip strength age faster biologically** compared to those with stronger grips.
* 🧘 The Journal of Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy emphasizes that there is **no single correct posture**, and **comfort should be prioritized**, allowing for **slight slouching if it feels better**.
* 📅 To improve posture, it is recommended to **change positions frequently**, ideally **every 15 to 20 minutes**, rather than maintaining a rigid stance which can **worsen discomfort**.
* 🏋 Three key exercises to enhance posture include bar hangs, glute bridges, and face pulls, all of which **strengthen critical muscle groups that support good posture**.
* 🔄 "Your best posture is your next posture," suggests that **varying positions can alleviate discomfort** and **improve overall posture aesthetics**.
* 📈 Regularly practicing glute bridges and tracking progress can help **activate and strengthen the glutes**, contributing to **better posture** and **reducing lower back pain**.

All right, so for most of my life, I've had pretty bad posture. 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 Go 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 Feelgood 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 going to be sitting, and the other one is going to 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 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 in our seats and have 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 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 going to 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 Reevaluate, 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 a 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 performance benefit? And I'm going to say no, it doesn't. It's largely this 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 Hunchback than others, that they perform worse. You might actually find that, you know, performance is going to 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 going to look at what Dan feels are the three best exercises that we can all do to improve our posture. Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video so far, then you might like to subscribe to Brilliant, who are the sponsor of today's video.

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full 30 days then head over to brilliant.org Al abdal or click on the link in the video description, and that will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this video. 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 30s and 40s, 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, you know, 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 going to help activate your upper back. It's going to 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. 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. They did this by comparing your chronological age, so that's just the number that you can see along the x-axis, and they 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 want to check it out. We're not going to 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. 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 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'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 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 15 to 30 seconds of the bar hang. For people who are a little bit more advanced, you should be aiming for 1 minute, and if you really want to be elite at a bar hang, you want to be aiming for at least like 2 minutes. Now, for me personally, I can just about bar hang for about 1 minute, but I'm aiming for 90 seconds and slowly inching that up over time. I'm finding I'm getting calluses in my hands, but like brown is 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 feel-good 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 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 going to 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 6 to 8 hours a day. So, one of the things that we want to do is we want to 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 going to be fantastic. I love to do this thing called glute Bridge holds, and it's where you are doing a glute bridge, but you're also holding it for about anywhere between 5 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 say, you can actually say that your supporting muscles are doing some of the work outside of the glutes, being the main muscle that you want to 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 then, 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, and also, uh, for me, I come from a history of chronic lower back pain. So, this is just to me one of the mandatory exercises that I have to do to make sure that my glutes are activated, to make sure I'm using them throughout the day, and also just to make sure that I'm also relieving any kind of like tightness that I would have in my lower back as a result of doing them. Now, I don't do these as often as I would like to, but when I do do them, I find that there's, it feels like there's a release in my lower back, which kind of feels, feels kind of nice. But then, if you do have access to a gym or a barbell or weights or a machine or whatever, then hip thrusts are a really good thing to do. And hip thrusts are fantastic because you can use Progressive overload, what we call Progressive overload, which is just adding weight to the bar, and then ever so often, what you're going to do is you're going to do this. It's basically

like a glute bridge, you're doing it on a bench, but you're using a barbell to lift the weight up. The other thing is, every single week that you go to the gym and you're doing these hip thrusts, you're going to add just like a little bit of weight to what you're doing. This is going to increase the strength and also the muscularity of your glutes, and then that is going to go a long way in making sure that you're walking and also standing with nice and tall posture. Oh, by the way, if you're enjoying this video so far, then you might like to subscribe to Sunday Snippets. This is a completely free email that I send out every Sunday where I talk through what I'm reading and what I'm learning as I'm reading and learning it. Now, for example, when it comes to health stuff, I have a personal trainer, I have a health coach, I talk to a lot of people about health, but it takes like months for us to make one of these YouTube videos, so if you'd like to

be a little bit more in the know of like, Ooh, here's a technique that I found to improve my step count, or Here's some tech that I found that's really helpful. You know, that's the sort of stuff I share in this newsletter. It's completely free; you can unsubscribe anytime. Head over to Ali ABD dal.com Sunday, or there'll be a link down below if you want to check it out. And finally, we come to exercise number three. Exercise number three is what is called a face pull. So, a face pull, what it's doing is it's allowing you to just retract your shoulder blades back and also activate your thoracic spine and upper back. And it's basically like a face pull. You're basically pulling a cable into your face as if you're pulling this cable into your face. It's called a face pull. It's going to be working your rhomboid. It's going to be working your thoracic spine, and also from a posture perspective, it's going to be working the

areas of your body that allow you to stand tall in the first place. Now, basically every personal trainer I've ever had has taken a look at my kind of Hunchback laptop kind of guy posture and has recognized that my RM boids are weak, which is why they've all recommended doing this sort of face pull stuff. And I've been doing that with my own personal trainer a lot. And like, people like friends and family have been commenting that I look a bit more jacked and my posture seems to be better. And I think that's because my RM boids are sort of pulling my shoulders back. Now, that's not to say that there is a perfect posture or anything like that. It just looks a bit more aesthetic when you're sort of like you've got, you know, shoulders back rather than shoulders forward, you know, that kind of thing. How to do this at home is uh get a resistance band and just put a resistance band uh onto a, you want to attach it to something which is not

going to you know you don't want to attach it to something where it's going to slap in your face you but we put this uh resistance band in the loop and then all we're do is using the face pull using the resistance band if it is at a gem then you're going to be using a cable machine uh usually with a rope attachment to pull the face ball back anyway the Big takeaway from this video is that there is no perfect posture and the most important thing you can do to improve your posture indirectly and for aesthetic reasons is to work on your strength and really this is what all three of these exercises do if you work on your strength by strengthening your grip your glutes and your core then your posture will just sort itself out as a byproduct of you getting stronger overall now if you enjoyed this video then you also hopefully enjoy this one that I made recently about three powerful habits that you can use each day to improve your health that's also a

bit of a dive into the research around what actually works from a science-backed perspective. So, I hope you enjoyed that video. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye-bye.

How to Have Perfect Posture (3 Key Exercises)

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The Importance of Grip Strength and Posture

Grip strength is now considered a biomarker of aging, with weaker grip strength linked to a faster rate of aging.

Bar hangs are recommended for improving grip strength, with beginners aiming for 15-30 seconds and advanced individuals targeting 1-2 minutes.

Perfect posture is a myth, but key exercises like face pulls can help improve posture by retracting shoulder blades and activating the thoracic spine.

The Benefits of Bar Hangs and Hip Thrusts

Bar hangs help stretch the lats and decompress the spine, alleviating lower back pain and improving posture.

For beginners, hanging with feet lightly touching a surface provides support while challenging grip.

Hip thrusts are effective for glute activation and can be progressively overloaded with weight, contributing to better posture and overall strength.

The Importance of Glute Strength and Grip Strength

Strong glutes are crucial for good posture and overall movement, but they can weaken from prolonged sitting.

Hip thrusts with added weight can help strengthen the glutes, leading to better posture.

Grip strength is an indicator of overall muscle strength and is correlated with a lower risk of back pain, longer life, and improved posture.

Activating Your Glutes for Better Posture

Sitting for long hours can weaken the glutes, making glute bridges a great home exercise to activate them.

Holding glute bridges for 5 to 10 seconds can increase glute endurance.

The key to improving posture is to switch sitting positions every 15 to 20 minutes and to strengthen the glutes, grip, and core for overall posture improvement.

Bar hangs, both passive and active, are effective for improving posture and activating the upper back.

Grip strength is a strong indicator of overall health and longevity, challenging the traditional view of posture.

There is no single correct posture, and comfortable positions, along with regular movement, are key to maintaining a healthy spine.