Evaluating Your Posture

An easy and quick way to assess your posture is to look at yourself from a side profile. The following five points should align vertically:

• Ear
• Shoulder
• Hip
• Knee
• Ankle

Your posture should reflect the natural S-shaped curve of the spine. These curves help reduce impact forces on your body by allowing it to be more resilient. Imbalances in your body usually contribute to poor posture. These imbalances may result from any of the following:

• Muscle imbalances: Muscles create movement by working in combination with other muscles. In a well-balanced body, muscles co-exist in balance with each other. For example, weak shins usually co-exist with tight calves and contribute to tighter muscles along the back of the legs.
• Tight muscles: Tight muscles, often a result of muscle imbalances, also create stress on joints, and result in less flexibility and less ROM.
• Past injuries: Accidents from your youth such as broken bones and torn ligaments can permanently alter your posture. A broken leg can lead to one leg being shorter than another. A shoulder injury that tore ligaments can lead to lingering stiffness and a reduced ROM on one side of your body when compared to the other side.
• Genetics: Certain postural deviations can be part of your family heritage. For example, scoliosis, a curvature of the spine is often an inherited condition. Another congenital condition that affects posture is flat feet.

After you’ve identified the causes of your postural imbalances, start addressing them. If the reasons are muscular, use an exercise program to improve your posture. Following one of the suggested core routines would be a great start, because these routines are beginning workouts that are suitable for people at all levels of ability. If the reasons are due to injury or genetics, your healthcare provider can help you find appropriate support such as heel lifts or orthotics for your shoes. Whatever your condition, you can always improve and if you have ideal posture, then you can work to keep up your great shape to stay that way.
Wearing high-heeled shoes daily contributes to poor posture. If worn regularly, high heels cause tightening and shortening of the calves, tightness in the lower back, and knee pain. Your best bet is to vary your heel heights and not wear the same shoes two days in a row. Reserve your high-heeled fashion shoes for times when you don’t need to walk long distances. Also, buy your shoes a half size larger and invest in some comfortable insoles, or for fashion shoes, get the less noticeable narrow versions.

How to Have A Healthy Back?

Regular exercise is one of the best ways you can prevent back pain. Good body mechanics, or moving properly, as you sit, stand, bend over, pick things up, and push and pull furniture are also important. Repetitive motions, if performed incorrectly over time, can cause joint strain and injury. You aren’t helpless against back pain. What you do daily makes a powerful difference. Small changes can go a long way to preventing debilitating pain. Observe the following basic tips for a lifetime of back health.

• Exercise regularly: Following a consistent, balanced exercise program will go a long way toward keeping you fit and strong.
• Use good posture: You can practice good posture every waking moment and improve your posture. Naturally, you aren’t going to remember every minute, but the more times that you catch yourself slouching, the more often you can correct yourself and use your core stabilizers.
• Move properly: The most common way people injure their backs is when they bend over, pick something up, and turn their body as they stand. Practice good movement mechanics whenever you lift, bend, or pick up and carry anything. Even if you pick up a pencil, use good movement habits. That way when you pick up something that is heavier, you’re much more likely to do it properly.
• Check your desk setup: Make sure your desk at the office and at home is set up according to good ergonomic principles. Make sure that your chair fits your body and that your computer and monitor are positioned so that as you work, you use good posture.
• Use a headset: Many people spend a lot of time talking on the phone and bending their necks into awkward positions. Your head weighs anywhere from 8 to 12 pounds. If you hold it improperly, you can affect your overall posture. Use headsets whenever possible, especially for extended conversations.
• Use a backpack: People often carry heavy and unbalanced loads on their shoulders. Balance the weight by using a good quality backpack and avoid carrying things that are too heavy.
• Buy furniture that offers support: Every chair or couch that you sit on affects your posture, particularly if it’s a piece of furniture that you use often. A good bed is also important, because you spend one-third of your life sleeping, and if you’re not getting good support, it will affect your posture. Make sure the furniture in your life is also supporting a healthy back and good posture.

Core Programs for Good Balance and a Healthy Back

More than 80 percent of adults in North America suffer from back pain at some point in their adult life. That statistic is staggering. In the United States, back pain is the leading cause of disability from work. One major American corporation spent $75 million in only one year to pay healthcare providers who treated employees with low back pain. Back pain is often related to poor posture and lack of stability in the spine, due to weak core muscles. In addition, poor postural stability over the years eventually leads to balance problems in later years. Increasingly, older adults are suffering from falls or from the fear of falling. The same contributing factors that present as a pain in the back when you’re younger, can lead to a broken hip or permanent use of a walker when you’re older. One out of every three people over age 65 falls at least once a year. Twenty five percent of people over the age of 50 who break a hip die from a fall within the first year after the accident. About 50 percent of those who break their hips never regain full walking ability. That should get your attention. The loss of balance and postural control doesn’t happen overnight, but occurs slowly over the years, as the muscles that support good posture grow weaker.
Just as you need to take preventive measures against osteoporosis and muscle wasting, you need to act now to preserve your sense of equilibrium for the future. Better balance also serves you well in dozens of sports, from mountain biking to rock climbing to in-line skating. You’ll catch on to these activities more quickly and avoid injuries that would befall those with a shakier sense of balance.
More and more health clubs are adding classes onto their schedules that incorporate core training and balance exercises and use balance training equipment.

How to set up your home gym for quickies?

If you think you’ll need quickie workouts from time to time to keep up your conditioning; then streamlining your home gym is essential. If you only have ten minutes to exercise, you don’t want to spend six of those minutes trying to find where you put your exercise bands. Management of your home gym space is critical for successful quickies. The following tips help ensure that your home exercise space is ideal for quickies.

• Consistent space: If space permits, the ideal situation is to have a dedicated space that’s only used for your exercise sessions. In many homes, however, space is at a premium. If you can’t allocate a spot only for exercise, at a minimum choose a place that you use consistently and that’s large enough for your movement needs.
• Storage containers for equipment: You must have proper storage for your equipment in order to find it quickly and to avoid accidents. Storage is particularly important when it comes to dumbbells because other family members or you may trip over randomly placed equipment. For every type of equipment that you purchase — dumbbells, bands, tubing, stretch straps, mats — you need to have a place for it to belong. Store dumbbells on racks and use baskets or crates for bands, tubing, and stretch straps.
• Workout plans or log: You want to be able to do your routine immediately. If you haven’t memorized it, you need to reference it quickly and easily. If you keep a workout log, keep it with all of your equipment. All of your workout design resources (such as this book) should also be easily available.

• Clock or timer: If you know that time is always going to be an issue, keep a clock visible either in or near your workout area. As an alternative, keep a timer and set it for 10 or 15 minutes or whatever you’ve allocated, so you’ll stay within your time budget and be sure to complete your planned exercises.

Putting Together Your Quickie Routine

Observe the following points each time that you train.

• Always warm up. Even for a quick workout, you need to prepare your body for more rigorous work. Walk briskly for five minutes before you exercise. This warm-up includes walking quickly around the house, the yard, or in the parking lot at the office.
• Work all major muscle groups. Be sure to do exercises for your upper body, your lower body, and your core a minimum of twice a week.
• Apply program variables. Even for short workouts, training frequency, exercise selection, order, amount of weight, number of reps, number of sets, and your rest periods are all still important components. Just because you’re doing a quickie workout does not mean that you can throw all the weight training principles out the window. All the rules still apply.
• Train in one minute sets. In general, one set of a particular exercise takes approximately one minute. If each rep requires two seconds up, a brief pause, and two seconds down, plan on five to six seconds per rep. Therefore, a set of 10-12 reps takes roughly one minute.
• Alternate upper and lower body exercises. When you want to reduce the waiting time during rest periods, switch between upper and lower body exercises so that one part of your body rests while the other works. Save your core exercises for last.
• Mix in stretching exercises. To be even more efficient, use your rest periods for stretches that target the muscle that you just worked. You can stretch your body all throughout the workout, and you won’t need extra time for a stretching segment at the end.

Making the Most of Quickie Training

Organize these quickies in whatever way works best for you. The following suggestions give you several ideas on how to fit quickie workouts into your lifestyle.

• Emergency total body conditioning: Normally, you do a 25-minute weight training workout 3 days a week. Imagine a time when your schedule is overloaded and you can’t possibly follow your normal workout routine. Instead of doing nothing, use one of the total body workouts to keep your muscles stimulated.
• Add on to your cardio workout: Let’s say you weight train two days a week and hit the gym for cardio on three days a week. When you can’t make it for your dedicated weight training sessions, add on a 15- or 10-minute quickie workout on the weight machines, after you finish your cardio-training.
• Divide your workout throughout the day: Sometimes it’s simply impossible to find more than a few spare minutes. Instead of giving up on strength training entirely, fit in a quickie workout in the morning and in the afternoon. You might even want to add on another session at night. Three 10- or 15-minute workouts easily add up to 30 or 45 minutes of training.
• Do a daily quickie: Maybe all you ever have time for during the week is a quickie workout. Until your life settles down and you find more time, schedule a daily quickie workout. Each day target either the upper or lower body and the core. Take Friday off. On Saturday, fit in one thorough total body workout and rest on Sunday.

Quickie Workouts for Busy Days

For best results, you want to train your entire body at least two to three times a week. Three times a week gives you faster results but takes more of your personal time. Studies show that you get 75 percent of your results from training two days a week, compared to training three days a week. Life happens. You can’t always stick to an ideal training schedule. For those days and weeks that are simply too busy, shorter workouts are better than no workouts. Or you can split up training your body into short increments daily so you hit at least each section of your body at least two times a week. Your training program needs to fit your life.
In this blog category, you get a variety of quickie workouts to use for those busy periods when you can’t follow an ideal training schedule. The quickies are organized in 10 and 15 minute segments and are appropriate for either the gym or the home. As a personal trainer and international presenter who’s trained thousands of people worldwide, Shirley recommends that you try to find at least 15 minutes each day in your schedule for a workout so that exercising becomes part of your daily routine — like brushing your teeth. These routines give you plenty of choices for what to do in those 15-minute increments.