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The Death Station Stand Up, Extend & Improve Your Breathing

The Death Station Stand Up, Extend & Improve Your Breathing

sitting sitting

Ahhhhh Sitting.. Sitting, sitting, sitting. Where do we begin? Look at the hunchback man in the picture above. Rounded shoulders, very forward head carriage and a flexed mid back. Oh, and his hips are flexed as well.

Notice the bottom half of the neck is in flexion (the pointy bits out the back of the spine are pointed more to the ceiling) and right up the top of the neck, he is locally extended. The consequences of this can range from mild to severe headaches, chronic muscular imbalances or even numbness and tingling in the arms/hands.

Apart from the noticeable postural deficiencies here, let’s look a little deeper. If your mid back is flexed over as shown above, your lungs sitting in the chest within your rib cage do not have the same ability to expand to their full capacity. If you don’t open your lungs properly, your ability to extend your mid back will be reduced, which will affect your scapula, shoulder mechanics, neck mechanics, and probably lead to some form of upper body injury.

If your diaphragm isn’t working properly it can affect your entire core stability, predisposing you to lower back injuries. If your core doesn’t work, your hip musculature may not fire properly and so on and so on.

We can speak about lifting posture another time, for today however, let’s chat about sitting. It’s the most performed activity in the world, period. Prolonged poor posture, whether it is in sitting, and standing or lying places excessive strain on pain provoking structures of all parts of the spine, hips and lower limbs – this is not good.

There are many things in life which cause some sort of consequence that we have no control over, this however, we do. It’s really simple. Stand Up, move, get some mid back extension and learn to breathe properly.
At The Sports And Spinal Group, we take breathing habits and the importance of postural control seriously. We will discuss some simple postural improvement strategies in our next post. In the mean time…Stand up, extend your mid back, and get fat with air in your abdomen!

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