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.
Structurally, the diaphragm is also in direct contact with the connective tissues of the heart and aorta. Any distortions of the diaphragm over time can affect pressures on the heart and aorta, impacting their function. The diaphragm is also penetrated by the esophagus, so slumpy posture can weaken the esophageal junction creating gapping of the sphincter within the esophagus. This, in turn, can lead to back flow of food, also known as acid reflux.
People who experience any or all of these issues (stress, heart problems, acid reflux, etc.) tend not to attribute them to bad posture. Back pain is an easier one to track to posture, but bad posture creates a host of total body dysfunction. Long-term, the effects of bad posture and not dealing with it, is pain, surgery, limited mobility, and a shortened life span.
2. Why do you think so many people don’t practice proper posture?
The body likes to take the easy way out. Gravity is very hard to resist, and it takes awareness and strength to maintain an organized upright posture, especially if your job involves sitting at a desk all day or other repetitive tasks. Ironically, people are always looking for a “quick fix” with their fitness or health, and the truth is, stacking your skull over ribs, ribs over pelvis, pelvis over knees, knees over feet AND pointing both feet forward takes less time than swallowing a couple of Advil… And it’s totally free!
3. What happens to your body over time if you don’t practice good posture?
Long-term bad posture makes for a very unpleasant existence – just think pain, body deformation, surgery, or pills (which then leads to a host of other issues). Your posture follows you around like a shadow. You have to shine light on it in order to make better alignment choices. People think about exercising their bodies, toning their butt or shrinking their belly, but if you do not exercise within good postural alignment, you will actually degrade the structures you’re trying to improve. Your tissues function best when they aren’t irritated by the daily grind of being “ground down” by lack of attention in how you carry yourself. Your father, like my father, has a job where stooping over for 8 hours a day is what paid the bills. Your body, from a musculoskeletal perspective, conforms to whatever FORM you demand of it. And repetition creates that form by strengthening, weakening and tightening muscles based on our patterns; i.e., the body inherently “compensates” accordingly to adapt. Unfortunately, many of our choices lead to degenerating our own vertebrae, bulging our own disks, herniating abdomens, tearing knee cartilage or creating stress fractures in our hips. All of this is preventable disease. Unfortunately, these very preventable ailments are costing individuals thousands of dollars in treatments and taxing the healthcare system.
I think one of the greatest causes of musculoskeletal disease is a lack of total body awareness. Most peoples bodies are littered with blind spots (areas of overuse, underuse and misuse), and they are not training in a way that heightens proprioception or body sense. Proprioceptors are the specialized nerve endings peppered throughout your body, found in deep joint capsules, surrounding muscles, in multiple fascial layers within muscles, and in the fatty tissues of the body underneath the skin. Improving our body’s sense of itself helps us to make better positional choices no matter what task we tackle. When your proprioceptors are not firing correctly, you become poorly coordinated AND injury prone. Most people know their way around the streets of their own city better than they know the map of their own body. This is a teachable skill. All of the various fitness programs I’ve created, including my entire Yoga Tune Up® format, are built around proprioception – as this is the foundation of self-care. Whether you’re an elite athlete, yogi, just starting a movement program, or have a chronic neurological disease – understanding how to map your own body so you can find and heal body blind spots is critical to good posture, and more importantly, to a long, healthy life.
4. What exactly is good (correct) posture?
Correct posture begins in a static position where the body resists gravity in the least stressful way on all physiological and structural systems. When in motion, the body stays correctly poised within each movement with the least amount of friction at each joint. In other words, you are not being pulled out of good posture by whatever motion you are making – whether it’s walking, bending over to pick up the newspaper, lifting weights, or doing yoga .
In terms of what good posture looks like…
When sitting, your brain and skull are directly above your heart, and the bottom of your ribcage is aimed down towards the pelvis like a periscope targeting upon a bony funnel (the pelvis). Both knees are hip distance apart pointing forward and your feet are fully on the floor (or on a slightly raised footrest). Your eyes and head are looking straight ahead (you should not be looking up or down at your computer!). This will help create the proper “S” shape of your spine. Your spine is actually a wave form, with two outward curves and two inward curves. The low back and neck are the inward curves and the sacrum and ribcage are outward curves. These curves must be maintained with some amount of tension (or better put, respect) throughout the day.
For standing, all of the above remains but now you want to make sure your hips are over your ankles, your feet are approximately 8 – 12 inches apart and your toes are pointing forward. Your weight is evenly distributed and you are not putting more weight on one hip or the other but are balanced on both feet. Ultimately, as you maintain this correct form, your body will “form” to this posture and “stand up for itself” with ease! When you are first reforming your posture, it is imperative to resist slumping or leaning as this is what begins to pull the body, foundationally, out of balance.
5. What are some easy ways to correct your posture when you’re standing or sitting at your desk?
As a posture check, give yourself a “dose” of 10 complete breaths several times a day to help re-firm your upright posture. Whether you are sitting or standing, attempt to breathe completely into the ribcage and abdomen by ballooning both areas of the torso in all directions without lifting the shoulders. The abdomen will need to have a bit of tension in order to sleeve the waveform of the backbones while breathing fully.
Then, go through a quick checklist… eyes looking forward with head above heart and lower rib cage pulled in towards hips. If sitting, both feet firmly planted on the floor; if standing, is my weight evenly distributed and my feet pointing forward? Just learning and being conscious of this simple checklist is a great way to start maintaining proper posture
6. How does yoga help you have correct posture?
Yoga in a broad sense can help with posture, but it can also be a posture killer and pain creator. Yoga poses are only therapeutic if you do them with attention to posture and the consciousness that each individual is a different package. Many Yoga trainings these days pay little attention to the importance of anatomy and physiology as it relates to poses, movement and each individual’s unique architecture at that point in time. While there is definitely a standard human structure, the effects of daily living and each individual’s postural habits create body blind spots (points of weakness and structural imbalance), so not every pose is built for every body. Many yoga poses are so extreme, they will pull the body way out of alignment because the architecture of the pose is not suitable for the person attempting the pose. If a yoga teacher is not focused or educated well enough to read the variance of the bodies in the room – their students pay the price.
Poses are not pills, and if you do poses, or any exercise for that matter, without knowing if you should even be doing that particular pose or exercise, much less doing them with improper form and posture, you will eventually wear out tissues and create pain. This is specifically why I developed Yoga Tune Up® with its focus on anatomy and physiology as it relates to human movement. Yoga Tune Up® has a wide variety of exercises that isolate specific joints to assess their relationship to neighboring joints and connective tissues as well as the body as a whole. This helps both the student and the teacher to uncover these body blind spots within the context of different shapes and positions both static and dynamic. It works to build strength and proprioception in these areas that have been overused or underused and bring them back to balance. Your body must be intelligently prepared for yoga, which is why Yoga Tune Up® is so useful to help students tune into their posture so that both their Yoga postures and daily postures can be performed more efficiently.
Jill Miller is the co-founder of Tune Up Fitness Worldwide and creator of the corrective exercise format Yoga Tune Up®. With more than 25 years of study in fitness, yoga therapy and anatomy, she is a pioneer in forging relevant links between the worlds of fitness, yoga, massage, and pain-management. Miller has presented case studies at the Fascia Congress and the International Symposium of Yoga Therapists and is a regular at International fitness conferences such as IDEAWorld, Can-Fit-Pro, ECA, Inner Idea, Empower, and Yoga Journal.
Her specialized Yoga Tune Up® teaching team can be found at variety of yoga and fitness facilities including Equinox, multiple CrossFit Boxes, YogaWorks, Crunch, and hospital-based training facilities worldwide. Miller and her products have been featured in Shape, Fitness, Whole Living,Self, Prevention, Yoga Journal, and Women’s Running, and seen on The Today Show, Fox News, ABC News; she is also a Contributing Expert at GaiamLife. Jill’s critically acclaimed DVDs and self-care therapy products include Coregeous®, Yoga Tune Up® At Home Program, the Yoga Tune Up®Quickfix Rx Series, the Pranamaya produced Yoga Link series, and Gaiam’s Yoga for Weight Loss.
