Video: Standing posture strengthening exercise

﻿Hello there, my name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you for joining me today where we, are going to be continuing on the topic of posture. But more specifically, we're going to be looking at standing posture and a little bit later on, I'll be showing you an activity that will help strengthen your back muscles. So you don't need any equipment for this. You just need yourself and a space on the floor. And if you prefer to do it on a mat, you might want to get that now. I would just like to give you a little message from our team. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. So you may be watching this as a child by yourself or you might be with a parent or carer. We will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. And each lesson we will aim to give you some ideas and activities that can be carried out either at home or in school. You may already have specific programmes that you're using, or advice that has been given to you by your child's school or therapist. So please make sure that you're using any information I'm giving you alongside anything you already have. And if you do have any questions, or would like help tailoring this to their needs, then please make sure you get in contact with your local therapy service. Let's recap why standing posture is important. So you need to remember to keep the 'S' shape of your back for a healthy spine. Let's have another look at the model of the spine again. So here where my finger is running down at the natural curves in your spine. And when you're standing, it's really important to try to maintain those natural curves and good weight bearing helps bones, joints and your body parts stay healthy. And the muscles will be working more efficiently if you're in alignment. So you'll have more energy for standing activities. Also, a good standing posture is important because it helps with your communication, your breathing and digestion. So being in a nice upright aligned position will help create more space for your lungs to work, for digestion to happen more easily, and to be able to project your voice. A good standing posture also gives you better balance and stability. So a static standing posture will give you better dynamic standing posture, because you'll be able to move in and out of activities if you start off with a good stable base. Let's recap on points to remember for standing posture. The four important things I'd like you to think about. The first one is, carrying bags. So this might be carrying your school bag, or perhaps helping with some shopping. So when you're carrying bags, if you have a bag that's just on one shoulder, try to alternate between both shoulders, because otherwise, you might get more pressure down on one side and end With some asymmetry, so if you have a backpack to carry your bags in, that would be a good idea because it distributes the weight evenly. And also, if you're perhaps carrying a bag on each hand, make sure you don't have lots of heavy things on one side, otherwise you're going to be tilted again. So think about the correct way to pick up objects. So if you drop something on the floor, or you're picking something up, or you've got to bend down, remember to bend your knees. If you're bending over from an arching your back, you're going to put stresses on the lower part of your back. So think about bending down, and using those larger muscle groups in your legs, which is their role to do to help in those things. And readjusting your position that's thinking about not always standing in a static steel position for a long period of time, you might need to come out of that position and return to it and if you're standing for a longer period of time, you might be just making small adjustments to be able to make you more comfortable and tolerate that position. And the last point there, exercises and stretches. As we always try to remember, we need to stay active. If we're staying active, it will contribute to our overall health. And we'll have healthy muscles, which will help promote our standing postures. If you do have any stretches or exercises you have been given, it's really important that you're making sure you're doing them. And remember, don't do them all in one go. Try and break them up into small parts over the day or the week perhaps. So let's think about strengthening for better standing. If we've got strong muscles in our tummies, strong muscles in our back and neck, strong muscles in the side of our trunk, which is either side of our tummy, and strong muscles in our legs, then we'll have a nice strong, stable base for standing posture. And what I'm going to go on to show you soon, is an activity to help strengthen the muscles in your back and in Unit Two, we will Looking at core strengthening and core strengthening, we'll look at activities to work on the muscles in your tummy. I would now like you to try this activity for your back muscles. It's called the Superman activity. So to try this activity, you need to be lying in your tummy. You need to keep yourself in a good aligned position to make sure that your hips, your knees and your ankles are all in alignment and you're comfortable. And the starting position, is with your face looking down to the mat with your arms above your head pointing forwards. And the idea is you're going to lift your head and your arms just off the floor, keeping everything else on the mat. I'm now going to show you a video where I will demonstrate and I'll talk you through the activity. So you'll see in this video that I'm lying in a nice aligned position on my tummy. And what I'm doing is I'm squeezing the muscles in my back to lift my head, and my arms off the mat. But I'm making sure as you'll see that I'm keeping my head in a nice aligned position by looking down to the mat and I'm not throwing my head back as I lift up. And the movement you'll see is quite nice and controlled. A way to perhaps extend this activity is to lift your arms and legs together. And you'll see in the video, that I am squeezing the muscles in the top of my back and also my bottom to lift my arms and my legs together. And again, I'm doing it in a nice controlled way. And I'm holding for about five seconds. So here I'm demonstrating some examples of how to simplify the activity. I'm pushing gently up into my elbows and back down to a lying position, then taking it a little bit further into a bigger back stretch. I spoke through some ideas about how to extend and simplify, but here they are written down just to make it a little bit easier for you. You can make the activity more challenging by trying to lift both your arms and legs at the same time. You could also hold the positions for longer. To simplify, you can push up and rest on your elbows and just feel a stretch in your lower back. If this is not comfortable, you can just rest line on your tummy. You could also hold any of the positions for less time, and perhaps start off with a small amount of time and build that up. So that brings us to the end of the lesson today on standing posture. And I hope you found that useful and giving you an idea for an activity to strengthen the muscles on your back. Remember to start off slowly and try the options if you need to. Next time in lesson 13, we will be continuing the topic of posture and as we come towards the end of the unit we'll be looking at dynamic posture. So you might think what is dynamic posture, dynamic posture is posture when we are moving, which is just as important as when we are standing still. So I look forward to seeing you again soon, take care, bye.

Lesson summary: Standing posture strengthening exercise

This lesson is a recap on good standing posture with a demonstration of a strengthening exercise to help your standing posture.

Standing posture strengthening exercise

Video

Lesson summary: Standing posture strengthening exercise

Time to move!

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