Using posture as an anchor: Part I

Using posture as an anchor: Part I

Form is everything. The muscle is form manifested. Form gives you a means to focus the energy of the movement towards the muscles you are trying to effect. Now we've talked about how force is generated by working against earth's gravity. Wither your running jumping performing a squat or a press, forces is generated by your muscles working against that force that would rather everything lay down right where it's at. The topic of today is how activating your postural muscles can aid you in keeping to the form and focusing even more energy into the targeted muscles. It's possible to have good posture without actively activating your postural muscles. If your shoulders slightly or aggressively roll forward then it might be a good idea to concentrate on having a slight activation of your postural muscles throughout the day. Not to activate your posture you retract and depress your shoulder blades. You can think about it as opening your chest and tucking your shoulder blades into your back pockets. This activated postural position is the optimal position for most resistance exercises. This is going to allow you to drop most of the energy generated from the movement into the targeted muscles and avoid energy bleed. Energy bleed is energy lost to body sway that doesn't go towards training the muscles. By anchoring yourself to your posture through upper body exercises  you stand lay or sit elongated with a tightened core. You then sink and slightly pull back your shoulder blades so you can feel your back spreading and your chest coming slightly in front of your shoulders. You try and cast that position. An visualization I like to use is that you allow you muscle to hang down and around your the top of your sternum or Chest bone. This is a great way to achieve proper leverage with curls and triceps extensions. Even if you lean forward on your extensions, It helps keep your AC joint from getting to active. It puts you in a great posit to work vertically. Pushing and pulling. Great for unbroken energy flow throughout the entire movement. You can really feel the muscles of the lateral delts firing when you build the strong open position and lower the weight around you. By creating the pillar of strength with the postural anchor you'll feel your core working throughout the entirety of the movement but the lateral raise you really feel it on the negative portion of the movement. The bench is a learning  tool for horizontal pushing and pulling. The contact of the bench on your back side gives you feed back on how open and drawn down you can keep your shoulder blades. When you lye focus on creating the strong base before attempting to move the weight. Flatten out your shoulders against the bench then tuck your shoulder blades towards you back pockets. Activate from there. Now your ready to work. This position mimics itself on rows. Machine or not. Push-ups planks, chest flys and reverse flys. If you have a hard time holding the position when you start to move around and generate force.The scapular depresion is a great way to strengthen those muscles and the position. Pictured it the vertical depression, what you don't see is the slight retraction of the muscles. You can always do the inverse of this move by using a horizontal pulling machine and allowing it to pull your shoulders forward and then after the stretch rebuilding the strong postural position. These work great as warm ups correctives or even strength exercises. In the 2nd part of this series I'll discuss how leg training and core training can be maximized with proper postural activation.