According to a study entitled “A review of
resistance exercise and posture realignment”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...&dopt=Citation , bad posture can't be fixed with exercise. What matters more is how you carry yourself when you're not exercising.
I've had posture issues my whole life. One of my legs is shorter than the other, which puts my spine on an unbalanced foundation. Therefore, I have to focus on posture all the time. Here's some tips:
1) Look Up
Make sure you know what good posture looks like and feels like. Look up information on the internet and at the library. It may be worth visiting a doctor to get a posture evaluation. Here's a site with good information
http://www.clevelandclinic.org/healt...asp?index=4485
2) Head Up
Good posture starts from the top. Keep your head up and eyes forward. At work, make sure your computer screen is raised to eye level so you don't have to look down at it. Same thing with your TV at home.
3) Sit Up
If you spend lots of time working in a chair at the office, you need to maintain good posture while sitting. Someone wisely wrote that the best sitting position is always the next position. That means you should be shifting positions regularly while always maintaining good posture. My favorite position is sitting at the front edge of a chair, which puts my hips in a downward slope, and forces an arch in my lower back. When that gets tiring, I'll sit all the way back so that the seat back supports my spine. Other times I'll cross one leg over the other. Sometimes I'll put my feet on the desk as long as I don't let my back get too rounded in the chair. It's important to keep your elbows off the arms of a chair as much as possible because that deactivates your posture muscles.
4) Stand Up
When you can, get off the chair and stand up to work your posture muscles. Activities normally done sitting, like watching TV or reading a magazine, can just as easily be done standing.
5) Chest-Up
If you have had bad posture since childhood due to chronic slumping or looking down, then your shoulders will be naturally sloped forward. Undoing the damage could take the rest of your life. To keep your shoulders back, lift your chest up. Doing so requires contraction of your back muscles. Keeping your chest up looks especially good on a woman.
The best exercise I can recommend for posture is sprinting. Running really fast works your posture muscles to keep your head up, chest up, shoulders down, and hips forward. Running fast also works your core muscles better than ab exercises. When I want to get rid of that little pouch that sometimes forms from letting the lower ab muscles get too relaxed, about 15 minutes of
running intervals (e.g. sprints, 8x400s, shuttle runs) is all it takes to slim that off.
Hope this helps.
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