EVERYTHING you need for good desk posture is right here…

Unless you happen to be a technophobe, I can say with confidence that 95%, maybe even 100% of you, sit at a computer for several hours a week, if not several hours each day!

Whether it’s checking emails, looking for holidays or writing documents for work, too many of you are sitting for far too many hours on your bums, glued to a computer monitor.

It’s KILLING your posture…

Modern life may dictate this daily placement but there are certain strategies you can put into practice, to help reduce common complaints such as headaches, backache and repetitive strain injuries.

To help you out of your desk-bound predicament, I’ve written a guide, especially for you, that will help you set up your work station, computer and chair so that you can reduce muscular strains, aches and postural problems.

All you have to do is click HERE and download the guide. Take the time to read the advice given and see what a difference you can make to your office environment!

Quit ‘shouldering’ the burden!

Atlas may have carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, but his were conditioned to do so…

Do you have any idea how important your shoulders are?

They do so much for you and yet most of you quite literally dump the weight of the world on them on a daily basis. Any time you feel stressed, tired, cold or struggle with an exercise, you hunch them up tight and pull them up around your neck.

The more often you do this, the more engrained the habit becomes. Some of you are literally walking around 24 hours a day with your shoulders raised and the feeling of a stiff, sore neck. This can be down to excess stress, but more often than not it’s down to neglected posture.

Sitting at a desk or in the car for hours at a time causes your body to migrate forward, which sees your chest tighten and your shoulders slump forward. Combine this postural position with the stress of deadlines and getting to places on time and you can see how easy it can be to bring your shoulder joint out of line…

Of course there is a solution, and I spend every single one of your training sessions trying to fix it;

‘Shoulders down!’
‘Draw the shoulder blades back!’
Lift the chest!’

If you just learned to use your core more efficiently, and engaged your shoulder stabiliser muscles every time you did an exercise, a lot of the stress that you put into your shoulders would be gone – overnight.

What’s more, the stronger your upper back muscles are, the less load your body will have to dump on your shoulder joint, to make up for their weakness.

In our sessions together we try to engage the scapular and abdominal muscles to support the exercises you are doing. If you are feeling tension in the neck or the shoulders it’s more than likely that your upper back muscles need a bit of a kick!

Here’s a tip: If in doubt, lift the chest slightly, draw the shoulders down away from your ears, and pull the shoulder blades slightly back.

You may end up feeling like a proud peacock, but what the hell? Good posture is definitely something to be proud of…

The ‘pooch belly’

Look at this picture. Another celebrity under fire for her ‘excess’ tummy bulge, BUT what you see here is NOT ‘excess’ fat as the magazine claims. This girl is too slim to be carrying fat in her tummy region.

What your eyes see is actually bad posture, caused by poor hip alignment. Fat doesn’t come into it.

How many times have I told many of you to stretch your tight hip flexors and use your glutes more? How often do I tell you to draw your belly button in slightly and use your core during exercises?

All that sitting each day is causing your hip flexors to tighten more and more, and your glutes to become stretched and weakened, tilting your pelvis forward, pushing your bum up towards the ceiling.

With this change in postural alignment, your tummy starts to round, and unless you are using your deep abdominal muscles, you will suffer with the ‘pooch belly’ look.

To the human eye this belly ‘mound’ looks like excess weight.

Of course, some of you will have excess fat in this region, but you can go a long way to reduce its pronunciation by learning to hold yourself properly.

SO, how to solve this universal problem?

1. Stretch your hip flexors in a kneeling lunge position
2. Focus on firing those glutes and using them during everyday movement
3. Work on your front and side planks to strengthen your deep abdominal wall
4. Give up traditional crunches that pull your posture further out of line

Solving the pooch effect requires persistence, but it can be resolved. Instead of grabbing your stomachs and complaining, stand taller, engage your glutes, stretch your hip flexors and practice your planks.

Only then will you will be on the way to a flatter belly – under any padding you might have.

‘Home’ Improvements

Ask most people what results they want from exercise and I can guarantee that the majority will give 1 of 4 answers:

1. Smaller, tighter bum
2. Leaner, more toned arms
3. Flatter stomach
4. Shapely or muscular legs

Now, if you picture your body as a house (after all, you live in it!), these ‘wish-list’ answers are all cosmetic improvements. They’re the equivalent of saying you want new windows and doors, a conservatory or a landscaped garden.

ALL of these building alterations will help improve the look of your ‘house’, but unless the foundations upon which your home sits are stable and safe, you’re only adding to structural problems, by making cosmetic change first. For example, what’s the point in fitting new windows to a house that is subsiding??

Your body is your home – you live there 24/7 and never move out, until the day you finally turn the lights out and shut the door on your life. While you live there it’s important to keep your home in order – starting with its foundations.

That means improved posture, core stability and flexibility. Don’t focus solely on cosmetic change. Our sessions together look at the bigger picture. That’s why, for example, we don’t do a lot of crunches. They may improve the ‘tone’ of your abdominals, but as a desk-bound human being, they will do so at the expense of your lower back and your posture. Why, when you sit all day slumped forward, would I want to train your body to pull forward even more??

YES, you will work on improving body parts that you dislike and developing a well-rounded body aesthetically. You WILL focus on building strength and shape in key muscles, BUT you will also build solid foundations first, by always returning to your core.

Focusing on your home’s foundations first is the key to success. When you have a body that you’re happier with, you want to be able to stand up tall and show it off, not stooped, with backache, rounded shoulders and a postural gut.

What’s more, if you want your house to stand out on your street you need to get rid of all the ivy and foliage, by exposing the bare brickwork. In other words shed any excess fat!

STOP! THINK before you LIFT!

Low Back pain affects 70% of the population. Next time you’re clearing out the garage or the loft, and you need to lift a heavy box off the floor, don’t tempt fate by lifting awkwardly.

The number of times I turn up for a client session, only to be told ‘Oooh, I’ve done something to my back over the weekend!’

The root of the problem usually lies in ‘tidying up’ or ‘doing the chores’. Next time, be prepared.

Stand close to the object or load that you want to lift. Centre yourself over it with a wide foot stance and draw in your abdominal muscles. Keep your back straight and look straight ahead as you bend your knees and squat down to the floor.

Get a good grip of the object with both hands, and keeping the load as close to the body as possible, breathe in. Then when ready, use your legs to stand up, lifting the load off the floor.

Avoid using your back to lift it. Your back should remain straight throughout the lifting phase.

Once standing, keep the shoulders back and the box close to the body. Then put the load down as soon as you can!

Check your posture!

As you read this, do me a favour…

1. Lift your head and draw your chin back towards your neck
2. Pull your shoulder blades back and down – your chest should lift
3. Draw your belly button in

There! You’re now sitting tall and confident at your desk.

STAY in that position until you’ve finished reading!

It’s ‘hip’ to have healthy knees…

The Single Leg Balance Reach is a great way to fire your glutes!

If you want bullet-proof knees that last a lifetime, you need to focus on the function of your hips.

You see, when you stand on one leg in life, you need stability at the hip, or else your knee will do all the work, and take the weight of your body on it’s fairly vulnerable joint.

‘Yeah, but how often do I stand on one leg, except during my training sessions?’ you might scoff.

You’d be amazed! Every time you climb the stairs, put one foot in front of the other to walk, or even climb into the bath or the car, you are performing a weight bearing exercise on one leg.

So, it makes sense to ensure that your hips are doing their fair share of the work. To keep them strong and coordinated you need to focus on glute strength — both the glute medius (at the side) and the glute max (the ‘rump’). This is achieved, in-session, through squats, deadlifts and single leg work, but it’s only effective if those muscles are already firing.

If your glutes are a little confused or stubborn at firing, we’ll hit them with warm up exercises that rid you of ‘glute amnesia’, but this memory regain is only temporary.

To stop those glutes becoming ‘work shy’ you need to use them as often as possible. Contract them when you walk briskly, tense them sat in the car, and squeeze them every time you practice your squats, lunges or when you get up out of your chair. The pressure will then be shifted through your hips, where it should be, not your knees.

The more you use your glutes, the less chance they have of snoozing. What’s more, the glutes are the largest muscle in your body, so the more you work them, the higher your total calorie burn will be. It’s a travesty really, seeing as most people seem to spend the majority of time sat on these fat-burning treasures!

Do you want to end up like this??

Course you don’t! Stooped over like this leaves you looking OLD, DECREPID and VULNERABLE. The truth is this isn’t the sad reality of getting old, it’s a sad neglect of good posture!

Blame it on leading a sedentary life, sat at a desk for hours on end, lying on the couch, cocooned in a car seat… We spend the majority of our lives sat down. When we stand up we are so tired and stressed that we pull our shoulders up around our ears and hold all that tension in the upper back and neck, which does NOTHING for our posture.

Do yourself a favour. Address the issue now, before you hit old age and need to start looking up just to see where you are going! Imagine you are a puppet with a piece of string hanging out of the top of your head…

Pull the string and your head will lift an inch or two. At the same time your chest will lift. With your hands down at your sides, try to subtly draw them down in the direction of your knees, so that your shoulders drop slightly. Think of this as drawing your shoulders away from your ears!

Now draw the shoulders back slightly. There! In a couple of simple moves you have gone a long way to improving your posture, but this is only a quick fix. If you are holding this kind of posture I will aim to bring you back into line during our sessions together, but to make long lasting change, postural adjustment will need to become a daily habit.

The more you practice, the more aware you will become of holding yourself well, and the less often you will slip back into poor posture. Start now and remain vigilant!

The Crunch – It ‘ain’t’ all THAT!

Some Crunch alternatives can double as party tricks!

Want to achieve a flat, toned stomach? Then do me a favour. Stop this persistent obsession with the CRUNCH.

It has a small place in your exercise program. It should never be a recurring theme or a goal of yours to keep cranking out more and more reps…

The typical crunch can actually do you more harm than good if practiced regularly, as it tightens your hip flexors, pulls on your neck and leaves you with poor posture. On the few occasions that you use the crunch, it must be performed with good form. Like any muscle, the abdominal wall can be overworked, leading to tightness that can pull the body out of alignment.

As you will have discovered in your sessions, there are many more satisfying ways to work the core, but gaining a flat stomach actually has very little to do with crunching. It comes down to good old fashioned nutrition. If you never did another crunch again you could still achieve a toned abdomen. Exercises like squats, lunges, overhead presses and ball work all work the stomach, as well as hundreds of other important muscles into the bargain.

But if you want to physically see those stomach muscles you need to remove the layer of body fat that may be lying over the top. That’s where nutrition plays a role. Unless you get your eating and alcohol consumption under control you may never see those muscles that have been working hard all this time!

fat loss

Don’t make your desk job any worse for you!

The majority of you work for a living, and chances are that your job entails a good deal of sitting, using a computer for hours on end. Even for those of you that don’t work in an office environment, I can guarantee that you still spend a substantial amount of time in front of a computer. Let me tell you something – desk jobs are bad for you.

Sitting at a desk for prolonged periods will result in your body migrating forwards, causing tightness in the hip flexors, the chest and in the front of your arms, not to mention neck and back pain. You desk dwellers really keep me busy! I spend my entire time trying to bring you back to straight, and then you go back to your desk and pull everything forward again!

OK, so it can’t always be helped – work is work, but there are certain things you can do to reduce the damage that such positioning is doing to your posture. The first line of defence is reducing the number of exercises you do that aggravate the situation. That means not being so heavily focused on the muscles that you see in the mirror. By this I mean the chest, the stomach, the fronts of the shoulders and the arms. Overworking these will only make them tighter, drawing you further and further forward into the stooped office worker syndrome!

Now you’re thinking; ‘but we do quite a bit of chest work, don’t we?’ Yes, we do, BUT at the same time I ensure that we do twice as much work on the back of the body too – the muscles that you can’t admire in the mirror! These are the very muscles that will help bring you back into the position that your body was designed for, and keep it there!

Exercising should be about reversing the effects of hours of seated posture, not magnifying it. What we really need to focus on are exercises that strengthen the muscles that keep our shoulders back, not the ones that pull them forward. We need more rowing-type exercises to strengthen the muscles that pull the shoulder blades back, not more pressing to pull them forward. It is also critical that we stretch the hip flexors before we start exercise, as these are nearly always tight.

The sessions that we do together will take care of these issues, but remember that an hour or two a week is not going to be enough to keep you from falling into poor posture if you are sitting at a desk for another 60-70 hours. Be aware of your posture, daily. Sit up straight, lift the chest, draw the shoulder blades down and back, and lift the head towards the ceiling, engaging the deep abdominals. Feel the change in your body’s positioning.

Once you know how it feels to sit properly, you are less likely to fall back into the slump… Give it a go and persist!