Number One Tip to Improve Posture Exercises

If I could give you one tip that would drastically help you improve posture exercises, it would be to focus on body awareness.  Too often, bodybuilders, personal trainers, and fitness experts neglect to state the importance of developing an engaged sense of your own body.  Body awareness is not only there to make sure you do the posture exercises correctly.  It is also important for developing a wholeness to your life.  Body awareness is directly linked to intuition, relaxation, calmness, and well-being.

The ability to maintain good posture is not always easy. When you work all day at a desk, the ability to maintain good office chair posture is made even more difficult. Simply put, our bodies were not intended to spend 8 to 12 hours in a seated position. This wreaks a great deal of havoc on the body and slowly weakens and disrupts proper posture. If your posture is poor then it may be an indication of future back issues. A good, relaxed, upright posture is vitally important to good health.

Body awareness refers to a sense of your own feelings, especially of muscle tension, positioning of the bones, breathing, pains, and emotions. You call it into play anytime you need to make a complex movement.  What we would like to cultivate is a heightened sense of what your body is telling you.  By using body awareness, you can improve posture exercises by doing them more consciously.

Here are some of the benefits of body awareness:

• Reduced injury, since you can stop before it hurts
• Better balance
• More good feelings, since you are trained to pay attention to them
• Relaxation
• More effective exercises

Let’s go into that last one in more detail.  Learning is increased when you focus deeply on what you are doing.  That means that you will learn the exercise faster, your muscles will learn better what they will need to do, and they will respond accordingly.  This works for strengthening and stretching muscles, especially with back exercises.

You will learn when to relax muscles.  You can identify what muscles are tense, how your movements can cause chronic tension, and focusing on a tense muscle tends to relax it.  In other words, you are learning how to consciously relax your muscles.  Try this when you are doing the cat pose yoga exercise.

In short, I would estimate that focusing on what you are feeling in your body while you do any exercises can double their effectiveness.  This especially counts when trying to improve posture exercises.  Good posture requires so much coordination of so many different muscles.  Having more brain power devoted to it can only be a good thing.  While you are exercising, listen to your body.  It is giving you messages that you tend to ignore.  Don’t ignore them.  Listen to them like you listen to wonderful music, or like you would listen to someone trying to give you an important message.  Quiet your mind, listen, and let their meaning stir up in your mind.

Tag: improve posture exercises

Category: Body Awareness Exercises