5 Exercises To Instantly Improve Your Posture And Strength – Part 2
Updated: Dec 19, 2024
Ash Berry and Rob Carruthers are highly regarded Pilates Practitioners in Australia. Through their explorations of alternative health practices, they've been able to create an incredible community of curious movers seeking to improve their overall health.
As discussed in our previous article, the idea of having good posture isn’t as simple as sitting up straight. Any posture or position held for prolonged periods can become problematic. In recent years, statements such as “Sitting is the new smoking” have been used to encourage people to avoid staying in chairs for extended periods. In reality, standing for prolonged periods is no better than sitting. A more accurate saying might be, “Your best posture is your next posture,” emphasizing the importance of movement rather than forcing yourself to remain in an “ideal” posture.
Posture is also heavily influenced by our emotional and physiological health. Think back to times in your life when you were under intense stress and the relief you felt once it passed – you often felt lighter, perhaps walking taller or more freely. A bad stomach ache often causes us to curl over; kidney infections might leave us standing very straight due to back pain; an ear infection can make us unsteady on our feet; and something in our eye might leave us incapacitated until it’s removed. All of this serves to illustrate that the idea of having a “good posture” is flawed. Instead, we should aim for a posture that feels comfortable, strong, and allows for easy movement between positions.
5 key fixes for your posture
Breathing
Helping to reduce your mental load can dramatically shift how you feel in your body. Simple exercises, such as slow but maximal exhalation through your nose, can calm your mind and physiology, directly impacting your blood pressure and heart rate. Lower blood pressure helps loosen up the body, making you feel more relaxed and flexible.
Eye exercises
Training our eyes is a simple yet often overlooked task – mind the pun. Much like our hands, feet, and ears, we take our eyes for granted until something goes wrong. But our eyes have muscles, just like any other part of the body, and they can be trained to become stronger and more flexible. Simple tasks, such as keeping the head still while tracking the movement of your finger in front of your face or rapidly moving the eyes between two points, can significantly improve posture and strength by upregulating the sympathetic nervous system.
Spinning and bouncing
As previously mentioned, our ears contain a labyrinth of canals filled with crystals and fluid that monitor our head’s movement. However, if we don’t engage in a variety of movements, this system can become a bit lazy. Simple exercises such as spinning on the spot or bouncing up and down create significant stimulation for the vestibular system and immediately recruit the majority of our posterior musculature, resulting in a more upright posture. Be sure to find the sweet spot—enough to feel slightly dizzy, but not so much that you make yourself ill!
Dancing
Fixing your posture doesn’t have to involve specific exercises at set times – you can have fun too! Dancing, for example, allows you to move freely, change positions regularly, and experience emotional joy and social interaction, all of which can instantly improve your posture. Many times, we’ve seen clients arrive in a bad mood and move stiffly at first, only to find joy and laughter in the process, leading to significantly freer movement. So, find joy wherever you can!
Play
The ultimate health improver is play. Play encourages a variety of postures, movement speeds, and social interactions. It doesn’t matter what it looks like to the outside world – engaging in physical play, ideally barefoot and outdoors, creates an incredibly powerful posture shift. This should be part of your daily routine. Play makes exercise fun and ensures your focus remains on the task at hand. It’s unfortunate that play is often limited as we get older, but it’s something anyone can benefit from, regardless of their physical starting point. Everyone needs to play, so don’t stop!
Read more from Robert Carruthers and Ashleigh Berry
Robert Carruthers and Ashleigh Berry, Pilates Practitioners
With Rob's blend of sports science and Functional Neurology training and Ash's Dance and Somatic Movement Therapy training, their Pilates sessions are always multi-faceted and multi-dimensional and cover a broad range of health interests that go beyond simply stretching and strengthening our bodies.
Their combined knowledge based has facilitated many life-changing journeys for their clients, and has resulted in being recognised names across the Australian Pilates scene. Their work also extends to facilitating world-class yet affordable professional development opportunities to Pilates Practitioners across Australia and online.
