Fitness guru Jill Miller reveals how to get great posture

Posture can make or break a woman. While perfect posture signals poise and class, bad posture can actually affect your health.

Fitness guru Jill Miller was featured on the Today show Monday morning for a segment on posture and shared the do’s and don’ts.

Jill is teaching people about their Body Blind Spots — these are areas of the body that are overused, underused, misused or abused and catalysts for injury. She recently explained the notion of Body Blind Spots otherwise known as proprioception on WebMD.

Watch Jill on Today, and below she shares her tips for perfect posture.

1. Aside from back pain, what are some of the lesser known real dangers of poor posture?

They are numerous and serious. For starters, what people tend to not realize is that poor posture creates multiple distortions throughout the ribcage. This may not sound like much, but these bony changes are disrupting vital systems of the body such as breathing and digestion. Your long-term slumping or leaning literally reforms the bones of the ribcage and spine, thus creating your own scoliosis. The imbalanced rib cage and spinal vertebrae then shift the line of pull on the most central muscle of the human body, the respiratory diaphragm.The diaphragm is your primary breathing muscle and when it becomes loaded with its own trigger points, stiffness, or weakness, it can create a host of physiological dysfunctions. The diaphragm is directly linked to the stress response and the emotional centers in the brain. Hence, improper breathing accelerates sympathetic overwhelm in the nervous system.

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Bring a Little Om into Your Clients’ Lives

By Carrie Myers

Do your clients and participants struggle to maintain focus during their workouts? Long the domain of traditional mind-body workouts like yoga and Pilates, mindfulness has made its way into mainstream fitness activities as well. In fact, increasing mindfulness in just about any type of workout not only helps increase its effectiveness, but could potentially lower one’s risk of injury as well. If learning how to help your clients make better mind-body connections, whether through yoga or other modalities, is one of your goals as a fitness professional, the ACE Mind Body Specialty Certification may be a perfect fit for you.

It is important to note that, even if you’re not interested in specifically teaching yoga or Pilates, you can still benefit from this specialty certification. As celebrity nutritionist, fitness trainer and author of Yes You Can: The Achievable Diet, Diana Le Dean says, connecting your mind to your body is necessary for full function.

“Mindful clients will become more active in their daily lives,” she explains. “Too many people walk around with great-looking bodies they don’t know how to use. A sculpted body that isn’t connected to the mind is like a gilded frame with no painting. When you think about how to develop a muscle group you also learn how to use it, and you’re anxious to try it out. Everyday living becomes easier and more efficient if we teach our clients and students how to connect the mind to the body.”
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