Sukie Baxter

Lists and apps and coaching, oh my!  There are so many ways to “get things done” these days, and though computers were supposed to make our lives easier – think, sipping Mai Tais in Bermuda while your digital devices download and complete all those boring spreadsheets – all they’ve really done is sped things up and increased the demands on our time.

But in the midst of all this high-tech gadgetry to streamline your daily to-dos, is it possible that a low tech solution could give you massive results?  As it turns out, studies have shown that a few simple tweaks to your posture can improve your problem solving abilities, boost cognitive performance and even give you better insight into what others are thinking.

How You Can Use Your Body to Get Ahead

We often think of body language as something that communicates our internal state to other people, tattling on our inner thoughts and emotions.  But the opposite is also true.  Our brains are the “other audience” of our body language, taking cues from our posture and movement that tell it what to think and how to behave.

This notion that we don’t just think with our minds but rather our whole bodies is called embodied cognition.  Basically, the body is not separate from the mind, simply an extension of it.

Four Simple Posture Hacks to Boost Cognitive Performance

Now, I’m not much for doing more, and I don’t like GTD apps (GTD stands for “get things done” just in case you’re not in the loop on that one).  I think we’re already trying to cram too much into our days.  When clients can’t spend 90 minutes of their days with their phone on silent because they’re too afraid of missing something, I know we’ve got serious problems.

But the kind of boost these posture tweaks give you are different.  These make you think differently, they connect your mind to your body and make you more effective at anything you’re trying to accomplish.

So, without further ado, here are some easy hacks anyone can implement…

1.  Cross your arms to increase persistence.

If you’re facing a tough problem that makes you want to throw in the towel, you might want to know about a 2008 study published in the European Journal of  Social Psychology.  In it, researchers showed that when presented with an unsolvable anagram, participants who crossed their arms were more persistent in trying to solve it.  And when they gave them a solvable problem?  Crossing the arms boosted performance.

2.  Take a nap to boost cognitive performance. 

Short naps of about ten minutes have been scientifically proven to improve cognitive performance and alertness, but be sure to set an alarm.  Nap any longer and you may find it much harder to wake up and return to work.

3.  Use gestures to make your message more persuasive. 

Studies have shown that the use of hand gestures to clarify your words makes your speech more persuasive than when you don’t animate your arms.

4.  Use mimicry to gain insight into what your audience is thinking.

We are all equipped with powerful cells called mirror neurons that serve to activate the movement portion of our brain when we observe another person’s activity.  Scientists postulate that these neurons help us to empathize with our fellow human beings.  So, if you want to get a sense of how your message is being received, mirror your audience’s posture and movement for an instant empathy boost.

That’s it!  Four super simple strategies to boost your cognitive performance and productivity.  The next time you have a troublesome problem or important presentation, try implementing one of these easy actions to get better results.

The word “posture” gets thrown around a lot.  We talk about it in reference to how we sit, how we stand and even how we present ourselves in social situations.

But what does “good posture” even mean?  Usually when we talk about posture, we’re referring to a static “pose,” but you’re not a stationary being.  You have to be able to bend, move, twist and function in the world.

Before you can start to fix your bad posture, you’ve got to know what good posture looks like.  And I’ve got a hint for you…it’s about much more than a single snapshot in time.

Let’s Redefine the Word “Posture”

How to Fix Your Posture

The biggest misconception about posture is that there is one single ideal that suits every person.

Good posture goes deeper than shoulders back, belly in.  Truly functional posture relies on muscular efficiency that maximizes movement potential for a given activity.

What that means is that you’re strong enough to support your body in an upright position and in any desired movements (like dance or martial arts) without excessive muscular density that “binds” your body.  All of your joints should move freely.  The impact of movement should travel through your structure like water in a stream.

Locked or fixed joints are like rocks in that stream.  They create interruptions, friction and waves.  They block the flow of movement.  These stuck or stagnant places are usually where the body breaks down – joints degrade, muscles spasm, and, ultimately, injury occurs.

Restoring your body’s ability to absorb shock and allow movement to translate through it makes you more resilient.  This kind of “posture” is ideal for transitioning from one activity to another.

The only bad kind of posture there is is the one that you’re stuck in.  Good posture, rather than being some kind of ideal we can all aim to achieve, is really having a set of options.  It’s being able to perform an activity like dance, yoga, weight lifting, or sitting at a computer, and then get up, walk away from the activity and not be stuck in that shape.

The people with the best posture are shape shifters in the most literal sense.

A Simple Exercise to Improve Posture

While truly fluid posture is something you can constantly hone and evolve, you’ve got to start somewhere.  And your spine is a good place to start.

A stiff spine doesn’t allow movement from your feet to translate through your back and core, so the movement gets stuck halfway through, creating more and more muscular density.

Remember, density without resilience is the enemy.  So, we want to restore your body’s natural shock absorbing function – contralateral movement.  This is the inherent twisting of your spine, like wringing out a rag, that happens when you walk (or crawl, for that matter).

This simple exercise reminds your spine that it can bend, flex and twist all at the same time, and it lubricates your joints while also bringing hydrating fluids into the muscles of the back and spine.

1.  Stand with your feet quite wide.

They should be two to three feet apart depending on your height.

2.  Spread your arms out to the sides.

Keep your shoulders relaxed and down as you do this – no shrugging up toward your ears!

3.  Bend at the hips and rotate your body to the opposite side.

You’ll touch your right hand to your left foot and vice versa.  The bending should come through the hips, so lift your tailbone toward the ceiling as you fold forward, allowing your rib cage to rotate with your arms.

Voila!  Contralateral movement restored.

This is a great warm up prior to exercise, or just a good way to wake up your stiff back in the morning.

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions, and if you haven’t already, join the thousands who have signed up to get the Weekly Reboot delivered fresh to their virtual doorstep each week.  Enter your email in the box below and I’ll also send you 5 Secrets for a Pain-Free, Flexible Body.  You can cancel at any time (but I’m pretty sure you’ll love it).

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Hopefully by now you’ve fixed your office posture so you’re not falling victim to the hunched shoulder epidemic sweeping our nation’s offices.

But just in case your shoulders are still tight and restricted, today we’ll take a closer look at what might be causing those rock-hard muscles in your back, neck and shoulders.  Surprise, surprise, the spot that usually feels the tightest is probably not the cause of the tension (are you noticing a theme here?).

Besides just making you feel stiff, achy and old, and embarrassing you in yoga class, tight shoulders can affect your cognitive performance and leadership abilities.  But there is good news, too!  Relaxed, open shoulders make you and the people around you feel carefree and at ease, freeing you up for enhanced creative thinking and problem solving abilities.

It’s sort of like those vitamin energy drinks that turn you into a superhuman who never needs to sleep, except this actually works.  And you might still need sleep.  But you’ll totally be superhuman.  Promise.

So, let’s get to it!

The Two Muscles You Must Stretch to Fix Hunched Shoulders

 

How Do Tight Shoulders Affect Physical and Cognitive Performance?

1.  The mental component.

Okay, okay, you’re tired of hearing me quote Amy Cuddy.  You know by now that Superman-like “power poses” actually change the neuro-chemistry inside your brain to produce hormones that make you look and feel more confident.  Cool beans, are we over it yet?

No, we’re not because I think that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.  Ask someone with tight shoulders to raise their arms above their head, touch the backs of their hands together with straight elbows and then move their hands so their arms are behind their ears.  Nothing doing.

If your shoulders are tight, you can’t fully get into a “power pose.”  Your arms are permanently stuck in the contracted position, so your power pose is, well, amputated.

Does that mean you’re not getting any hormone boost?  Probably not.  Does it mean the boost is diminished?  I honestly don’t know.  But what I do know, not from research and double blind placebos but from hours and hours, days and days, years and years of helping people free their shoulders, is that relaxed, open shoulders allow people to breathe more fully and feel less stressed.

Maybe it’s related to the neuro-chemical changes happening in your head.  We do know that tense muscles affect stress levels, so it may just be that downgrading your overall level of tension gives you a relaxation boost.  Whatever the cause, tight shoulders give you headaches and exhaust you more quickly while open, relaxed shoulders allow you to breathe more fully, get ample oxygen to your brain and generally feel better.

And speaking of breathing more easily…

2.  The physical component

If your shoulders are tight, they’re restricting your body’s ability to take in oxygen.  This is no bueno because decreased oxygen means decreased physical performance.  If you’re an athlete or even a weekend warrior, you can vastly increase your lung capacity simply by opening your shoulder girdle and allowing more space for your lungs to expand.

And since we’ve established that tight shoulders affect the ability of the ribs to expand and allow the lungs to take in oxygen, we can infer that tight shoulders will also restrict spinal mobility.  Your ribs play a huuuuuuge role in spinal support.  If the muscles around your rib cage are tight and the ribs can’t move, those ribs, which attach directly to your spine, will prevent your from bending, twisting and rotating to your full potential.

Ida Rolf, myofascial pioneer and founder of Rolfing Structural Integration, always said there is an order of operations for organizing the structures of the body.  One such axiom is that appendicular (referring to your arms and legs) order precedes axial (referring to your torso and neck) order.  In other words, you can’t fix dysfunctions in the spine until you address dysfunctions in the arms and legs.  That includes the shoulders, being the main joint that joins your arm to your torso.

Great, Got It, Shoulder Mobility is Important.  What Do I Do?

There are lots (and lots and lots and lots) of ways to stretch your shoulders.  These are only two options that I like in combination because they focus on both opening the front and strengthening the back.

1.  Superman Shoulder Openers.

Lie on the floor, face down, arms out to the sides with thumbs pointing up toward the ceiling.  Contract the muscles between your shoulders to lift your arms off the ground.  You’ll strengthen your back muscles while stretching your pectorals in the front.

2.  Twisty Arm Pretzel Behind Your Back.

Reach one arm up and place your hand behind your back between your shoulder blades.  The other hand reaches under and behind to grab the fingers of your first hand behind your back.  Use a strap if you can’t reach.

Make sure you press the elbow of your upper arm both up toward the ceiling and out away from your ear to externally rotate the arm bone and really get a stretch for the lats (you might feel it in your armpit a bit).

And there you have it!  A brief guide to shoulder flexibility.

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions, and if you haven’t already, join the thousands who have signed up to get the Weekly Reboot delivered fresh to their virtual doorstep each week.  Enter your email in the box below and I’ll also send you 5 Secrets for a Pain-Free, Flexible Body.  You can cancel at any time (but I’m pretty sure you’ll love it).

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Do you feel like no matter how much stretching you do, your hamstring flexibility never increases?

Tight hamstrings continue to be one of the most common complaints that I hear about, and there’s a reason why focusing solely on hamstrings will quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.

Nothing in the body functions in isolation.  To lengthen the back line of your legs, other systems (i.e. muscles and fascia) have to accommodate movement of the hip joint, pelvis and spine.

That’s what we’ll look at in today’s Weekly Reboot, plus I’ll show you two exercises you can use to mobilize these “secret” muscles that affect hamstring flexibility so you can get more stretch out of your efforts.

What Other Muscles Are Making Your Hamstrings Tight?

How Do Tight Hamstrings Affect Your Body?

Restricted hamstring mobility, or, more accurately, restricted movement in forward flexion (meaning when you bend down to touch your toes), can be a big problem.  It hints at deeper mobility issues in the hips and pelvis that, as you age, can turn into real problems that prevent you from doing simple things like putting on your socks or picking up lint from the floor (because lint collection is very important, you know).

Also, tension in the myofascial network around the hip joint puts strain on the lumbar spine, over-burdening the deep psoas muscle of your core and causing digestive issues, lower back pain and even feelings of fear and anxiety.  A healthy, functioning psoas is juicy, fluid and soft, massaging your internal organs with every movement, and its inherent connection to your body’s innate fear response makes this muscle a very useful gauge for gut feelings and intuition.

 

But when the psoas has the additional burden of supporting your pelvis, functioning almost like a strut for your spine (which is – or should be – much more like a springy slinky than a Roman column), you’re likely to experience dissociation from your body, ongoing low-grade anxiety or fear, limited range of motion and flexibility, and a whole host of other symptoms that typically aren’t linked to postural imbalance until symptoms become so burdensome that the body sets off its red alert system – pain.

How Can You Augment Your Hamstring Flexibility?

To get more mileage out of your hamstring stretches, you have to look at other muscles that affect hip mobility, especially the adductors.  When we look at the anatomy of the hip, we can see plainly that the adductor group attaches along the long, straight bone at the base of the pelvis, the same bone to which the the hamstrings attach at the back.

 

When you bend forward, this bone sweeps back and up as the top of your pelvis rotates forward and down.  If your adductor muscles, some of which are very large and all of which are quite strong, aren’t used to lengthening, they won’t be able to allow this kind of movement of your pelvis.  So, no matter how much you stretch those hamstrings, if your adductors are tight, you’re not going to gain much flexibility.

Two Exercises to Open Your Adductors

1.  Dynamic Deep Lunge

The deep lunge will lengthen your hamstrings and your quads when you hold it in a static position, but when you move dynamically from side to side, you open up the entire fan of muscles around the hip joint, including your adductors.  Adding in dynamic movement also engages your nervous system, which is helpful for stretching adductors because they tend to be super strong and not overly responsive to static stretches, unless you’re very patient.

From your hands and knees, step your right foot up next to your right hand.  Push off your left knee and stretch your left foot behind you, toes curled under.  Sink hips as low as possible.  Walk yourself around so that your left leg is in front, right foot extended behind you, sinking into the stretch for a moment.  Return to the start and repeat as many times as you like.

2.  Ballet Squat

This movement teaches your body to engage the glutes and lengthen the adductors while supporting your weight.  Again, the dynamic movement helps you to develop new neural pathways with long adductors instead of keeping them short and tight.

Stand with your feet about two to three feet apart, depending on your height.  Turn your feet out to the side 45 degrees, or more if you have the flexibility.  Pressing your knees firmly out, sink down into a squat as far as you can go.  Place your hands on the outsides of your knees for proprioceptive feedback to help you engage your glutes and turn your knees out.

Once you’ve worked to open up your adductors, return to hamstring stretches and notice your increased mobility.  I find it also helps when folding into a forward bend to imagine those adductors lengthening as much as I focus my attention on the hamstrings extending.  Attention is key.

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Let’s face it, office posture matters.  From slumped shoulders and aching backs to diminished confidence and creativity, poor posture can have a profoundly negative effect on your physical health, happiness and productivity.

But aside from trading in your desk job for life as a yoga instructor where you can stretch eight hours every day, what can you do?

Fortunately, posture is a result of how we do what we do, not so much what we do and with a few small tweaks to your daily habits, you too can be standing taller and reaping the rewards of better office posture in less time than it takes you to check your email each day.

Why Office Posture Matters

The research is clear: good posture matters.  According to the Institute for Medicine, workplace muskuloskeletal injuries result in more than $45 billion lost every year.  And, if performance is your primary concern, Amy Cuddy’s now famous TED Talk demonstrates that your posture is how you’re perceived, both by your own brain and by people around you.

So, if you want an instant jolt of confidence, mental clarity and energy, all you have to do is shift your posture.

Here are three tiny tweaks that have a big impact

#1  Change how you’re sitting.

You want the seat of your office chair to be two to four inches higher than your knees so that your hips are sitting above the level of your knee.  You can have it higher if you want, but sitting with your hips lower than your knees puts pressure on your lumbar spine (lower back) and forces your shoulders into a slumped position.

It’s no good trying to sit up straight if you’re starting from this position.  You’re just battling physics.

Notice my chair in the video…it’s super un-fancy.  I didn’t spend a lot of money on it, and you don’t have to, either.  But, let me go into why I like this particular chair.

First, it has a hard seat.  Soft seats tend to rock your tailbone under and curve your spine into an unfortunate c-shape that promotes the hunched over computer programmer posture that is so unhealthy.  Second, it rocks.  A chair that rocks allows me to pour my weight into my feet, taking strain off of my back and core.  It’s a simple measure of efficiency.

For great back relief at work, sit with one foot in front of the other, both flat on the floor.  This is called the rocker stance and it will save your neck…literally.

And, yes, this chair is WAY too low for my over six foot frame.  I’ve padded with blankets to raise up the seat.  This is the constant battle of tall people.  If you are shorter, count yourself lucky because it will be much easier to find a chair that fits.  Taller people, seek out creative solutions or just buy a chair that’s adjustable height.

#2 Turn your body toward your work.

Your body influences your brain just as much as your brain influences your body.  If you’re not facing your work, you’re sending mixed messages to your brain.  It basically means that you’re both coming and going at the same time.

If you struggle with focus or fall victim to procrastination, this one is key.  But, you might also have to take a long hard look at your job.  If your body is on its way out, maybe it’s time for your brain to follow.  Only you know if that’s true.

#3  Make new movements.

Your body gets really good at doing whatever it is that you do repeatedly.  This is a good thing and a bad thing.  On the one hand, you develop incredible efficiency of skill, but on the other, you can get stuck in a self-limiting posture.

The famous computer slump is one of them.  To combat this, spend a lot of time taking your shoulders in the opposite direction that the computer does, i.e. backward.

Hang in a doorway, stretch using the corner of the wall or grab a broom and try this shoulder stretch.  Whatever you do, do it often.  That way, your body won’t freeze in de-evolution.

The Posture Mistake You Must Avoid (cue dramatic sound effects)

When you think of good posture, the first things that pop into your head are almost definitely, “shoulders back and stomach in!”  But yanking on your shoulders to wrestle them back behind your chest won’t last too long.

As soon as you have a different thought, your body will revert to its old ways.  Not to mention, trying to “do” posture is a losing battle.  You’re just adding layers of tension over tension.  Increased levels of tension in your muscles will zap your energy and send a signal to your brain that you’re stressed out, which in turn makes you feel stressed even if there’s nothing to be stressed over.

Soon you’ll be looking for reasons to be stressed.  This makes people unhappy.  I don’t recommend it.

Also, someone walking around with tight, rigid shoulders makes other people uncomfortable.  You look stiff and uptight.  And like you’re hiding something.  Even if we don’t think it consciously, we’re wondering what deep-seated insecurity you’re covering up.

So please, stay relaxed.  You’ll get much more mileage out of improving your posture if you just take a (really) deep breath and release all your tension.

Once you make these small changes to your office posture, you’ll notice a world of difference in your performance, confidence and happiness.

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