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One guideline common to many physical activity guidelines around the world is to do muscle strengthening exercises at least 2 days per week. For the purposes of posture improvement and maintenance, there are (at least) two ways to incorporate strength sessions in your routine, depending on how long you’ve been doing corrective exercises (HABIT#1).

For beginners, you can add a weekly training session (at home or at the gym) to supplement your daily corrective regimen. This session can include beginner strength exercises such as: bench rows, inverted rows, planks, Palloff press, goblet squat.

After you’ve been doing your daily corrective exercises for several weeks or months, you can gradually replace them with more advanced strength exercises performed 1, 2, or 3 times per week. This will help maintain any posture improvement you have attained without having to perform corrective exercises every day (which would not be very time-efficient). This sessions can include more advanced exercises such as: weighted squats, deadlift, pullups, etc.

Much of our productive work nowadays is done on laptops, especially by students and remote workers. This article will focus on ergonomic use of laptop computers.

The most important consideration when using laptops is to keep the top of the display as close to eye level as possible. This helps minimize slouching but also makes it more comfortable to use for longer periods. Even if you aren’t able to bring it directly to eye level, every millimeter that the screen is raised matters. Do the best that you can, given your situation, using a combination of the following tips:

1. Raising the laptop using a laptop stand or textbook, or by raising the desk if adjustable
2. Buying a laptop with a closer-to-square aspect ratio (16:10 or 3:2, rather than 16:9)
3. Enabling full-screen mode to hide unnecessary menu or title bars at the top of the display

You spend around one-third of their life asleep (assuming you’re a human reading this), so modifying your posture during sleeptime is crucial. A less-than-ideal sleeping position can undo whatever other efforts you do, such as daytime corrective exercises (HABIT#1) or ergonomic workstations (HABIT#3). Therefore, this habit complements the other habits to cover as much of your 24-hour day as possible with therapeutic postural maintenance.

There are two sleep positions that are particularly harmful for posture: 

(1) Side sleeping in fetal position – You lose the normal neutral spinal curves, and both your lower back and upper back are excessively flexed (rounded).
(2) Back sleeping with excessively-high pillow — Using a pillow that is too high for your natural neck curve forces your neck to jut forward, and maintaining that unnatural position for hours during the night just perpetuates your forward head positioning.

To fix issue (1), try changing your bed firmness (try a medium-firm mattress, or use a thin memory foam mattress if your bed is too firm for side sleeping), arm placement(try placing one hand behind your hip), blanket thickness, room temperature, etc. You can even experiment with sleeping with a body pillow.

To fix issue (2), try placing your head on a thinner pillow; that way, your neck would be in a lower vertical position (not as much jutted upward/forward).

OPTIONAL PRODUCTS for BEDROOM:

TBA…

The place to start for most who want to improve their posture is with some set of daily corrective exercises. The right set of exercises for you, the reader, depends on factors such as your individual postural deviations, how much time you have available each day, and other considerations. However, what is more important is frequency (doing those exercises every day or even 2 or 3 times per day) and consistency (rarely skipping days).

A good physical therapist or personal trainer can help with crafting a customized routine for you. However, if you don’t have access to a PT, a good starting routine is the following pair of videos on YouTube. These two videos focus on the most common postural deviations: forward head + rounded shoulders. If you have a sedentary occupation, then it’s highly likely you have this combination as well. Each video contains both stretching and strengthening exercises. Combined, they synergistically help reverse some of the most common postural issues found in the general population. Video 1 contains exercises for forward head posture (FHP). Video 2 contains exercises for rounded shoulders (also referred to as “upper cross syndrome (UCS)” in the video). In my opinion, this is one the best beginner exercise sequences for posture that I’ve come across on the Internet. Keep in mind that these videos provide only one possible starting point. You can add to these with your own custom exercises that you have found to be helpful, or any that your personal trainer or physical therapist recommended. The key is start with something, do it consistently, and add to it or replace some exercises over time.

VIDEO 1 : https://youtu.be/wQylqaCl8Zo

VIDEO 2 : https://youtu.be/SYr6lbx68n8

To start, try doing both routines each day, taking a rest day as needed. You can start with 5 or 6 days a week for 4 weeks. Compare your posture at the beginning and end of the four weeks; a minimally-clothed side profile photo works best for this purpose. If you see noticeable improvement..great! You will most likely see some shift in your neck/shoulder positioning, even if subtle.

CHALLENGE: Perform a corrective regimen of your choice at least 6 days per week for at least 4 weeks.

PostureSuperResource is a free web book that takes a habit-based approach to improving one’s posture. Each chapter focuses on a single habit that you can implement in your life; multiple such habits implemented in your life can nudge your posture into a more optimal posture.

The habits are synergistic; the more of them you can do the better. It is better to implement these habits concurrently (at the same time), rather than sequentially (doing one habit for one month then another the next month). The first two habits in particular work well together. HABIT#1 (Corrective Exercise Regimen) is something you can do daily during the day, while HABIT#2 (Sleeping Positions) is something you do passively during sleep. I recommend you read both of these chapters to start.

Click the link below to read about HABIT#1 on doing daily corrective exercises.