We all share a huge passion...FORGE Unfortunately this means we are all sitting for extended amounts of time through out the day I am not going to try and persuade you guys to start exercising, but I do want to help with some things you guys may not be aware of. I just wanted to start off by saying that fitness/health is my true passion. I train calisthenics 7 days a week and I absolutely love it. I am a certified personal trainer through the NCCA and am furthering my education. FIRST I want you to stand up right now and put your arms by your side keeping your natural, relaxed posture. Keeping your arms the way they are I want you to point your thumbs straight out. Now look down. If your thumbs point towards each other in any way, then you have your first postural deviation. Have you ever been walking behind someone and notice you can literally see their palms? This is because they have kyphosis with internal rotation. Don't worry, if this is you, I am going to help you fix this. Kyphosis with internal rotation is extremely common. To keep it simple, you have facilitated/hypertonic (shortened) muscles pulling your body forward and have inhibited (lengthened) muscles that can't help your body maintain its proper posture. Think of it as your body losing a tug of war match. Tight muscles -Pec major and minor (chest) -Anterior deltoid/subscapularis -Serratus Anterior -Biceps -Lats -Upper Traps Weak Muscles -Low/Middle Traps -Post deltoid -Rhomboids -Rotator Cuff I WANT YOU TO IGNORE THE LOWER HALF OF THE BODY FOR NOW This is important because if you are losing that tug of war match, the muscle that is tight will be overactive neurologically, and dominate the joint leading to dysfunctional movement. You can get this from mainly one of two things 1) You sit and FORGE all day or have a desk job. You drive a lot. You lean forward when on your phone. You are chronically putting yourself in poor positions and your body will adapt. 2) AHH my favorite The gym know it alls who think they have a balanced strength program. The guy that benches 3 times a week with no horizontal pulling movements. (The picture below will explain why this can lead to bad posture) IMPORTANT Remember you want balance at the joint. If you bench 3 times a week, you better be doing horizontal pulling movements 3 times a week to maintain a healthy relationship. So any time you work a muscle there is the agonist and antagonist. Bicep curl: Bicep - Agonist (Prime Mover) Tricep - Antagonist (Relaxes) Anytime you engage the agonist the antagonist is forced to relax (BE STRETCHED). A lot of people have a hard time believing this. So an example would be a lot of people when doing sit ups complain their hip flexors get tight (right by your groin) A way to eliminate this is to have a foam roller between your butt and heels and keep your hamstrings tight. When your hamstrings are contracting your hip flexors are forced to relax. TRY IT OUT! NOW what you are going to want to do to fix this is stretch the tight muscles and strengthen the weak muscles to help your body restore proper posture. Easy right? A lot of you will probably think you should go start blasting away on the row machine. You're almost right. Just because a muscle is lengthened doesn't mean it is weak. You can have kyphosis and still perform repetitions with the max weight on the seated row. Allow me to explain. Lengthened muscles are strongest in lengthened positions. So when people reach out for the seated row and pull from that lengthened position (In scapula protraction) they are at their strongest and pull through the range of motion using that momentum. In other words the muscle isn't strong in regular/shortened positions. BTW IDC WHAT ANYONE SAYS THIS IS NOT THE PROPER STARTING POSITION FOR THIS HOW you want to approach fixing muscle imbalances is by stretching the tight/shortened muscles and perform ISOMETRIC contractions on the lengthened/weaker muscles. You have 2 types of muscle fibers 1)Slow twitch (endurance) Type 1 2)Fast twitch (explosive) Type 2 The muscles responsible for maintaining posture are your type 1 fibers. Back to the seated row scenario. When pulling that much weight you are using type 2 fibers and this won't help with fixing your posture. You want to condition your type 1 fibers in lengthened muscles so you restore good posture. AND guess what, when performing isometric contractions in lengthened muscles, your tight muscles are forced to activate a stress response like I said earlier which will help you. So one good option could be to do a seated row with a light weight (not too light) and hold the contraction (scapula retracted) for up to 1 minute. This is going to recruit those endurance fibers. Im going to give you stuff to do at home though to make it easy for you guys. Now I don't want to write all of this only to make you watch a video, but this guy is a legend and sums up this topic perfectly. Here are the stretches and exercises you should be doing. If you don't have a resistance band do Y raises on the ground in a prone position and do the stretches he recommends. THIS WILL LIGHT YOUR LOWER TRAPS UP 3 sets max hold (elbows locked) with no more than 30 seconds rest between sets Perform all the stretches in the video daily for 30-60 seconds to mild discomfort THIS PRETTY MUCH SUMS UP KYPHOSIS AND HOW TO FIX IT NOW I am going to help you guys with another postural deviation which is Anterior pelvic tilt. This will be nowhere near as long so hang on you are almost done Being in seated positions all day will shorten your hip flexors leading to the middle picture above. You try to stand but your hips pull you forward due to how tight they are. Now its not necessarily that your hamstrings have become lengthened but now since your hip flexors are shortened they fire quickly with daily movements. Remember when a muscle fires the antagonist will relax. Well if you have tight hip flexors and lift your leg your muscle activates quicker inducing a stretch response from the hamstrings. Anterior pelvic tilt: TIGHT - Low back, hip flexors (stretch these) Inhibited - abs, hamstrings (strengthen these) Again I'm gonna post this video cause it addresses the issue perfectly I got really lazy typing the rest of this BUT IN CONCLUSION These 2 postural deviations are so common in our generation. Especially us FORGERS So I wanted to give you some insight on why its important to maintain good posture and how to go about it If you don't have these issues GOOD JOB A GOOD TIP FOR WHEN SITTNG: Imagine a ball between your upper back and the chair. The goal is to not let the ball drop down ever. This will form good habits when you sit. I PROBABLY FORGOT SO MUCH I WAS GOING TO SAY BUT IF ANYONE NEEDS HELP, WHETHER ITS GETTING STARTED WITH A WORKOUT PROGRAM, OR YOU HAVE DIFFERENT POSTURAL DEVIATIONS THAN LISTED ABOVE, OR YOUR GOALS LEAVE A COMMENT BELOW
Awesome thread. Didn’t have a chance to watch your videos yet, so this may have already been mentioned... For anyone who’s doing weight training, this may be the most important exercise you do: I generally try to do twice as many pulls as pushes. A good way to go about this is to do some type of row between sets of bench press, and a vertical pull (chin/pull-up, lay pull down) between sets of overhead presses. Then add in something like the face pulls shown above or a reverse fly.
Absolutely. All my workouts are superset based now. Exactly what you said agonist/antagonist muscles groups such as vertical pull followed by vertical push, then horizontal push followed by horizontal pull and so on. I always end my workouts with rotator cuff exercises like the face pull as well, very important. omg I love these so much Do me a favor and please go out of your way to run into this guy