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0 Posture

5 Ways Better Posture Improves Brain Health

You already know that your mind can impact your body. There are piles of studies showing how “mind over matter” breaks through seemingly impossible physical limitations.

The placebo effect is well-documented in medical studies, and athletes use the power of visualization to optimize their sports performance.

But does it work in reverse, too? Can the state of your body influence your thoughts and emotions?

You’d better believe it.

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of just how much our posture and movement influence our brains. It turns out that your body is in constant, two-way communication with your brain, transmitting all kinds of data about safety, connection, even social hierarchy through your nervous system.

Your posture even has the power to influence physiological processes like body chemistry. So if you thought better posture was just about alleviating that ache in your neck, you might be surprised to learn just how crucial standing up straight can be for things like energy, focus, and confidence.

Here are five ways that better posture improves brain health.

No. 1 Sitting up straighter improves problem solving skills.

Have you ever experienced the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat that accompany test anxiety? That’s no fun, but you’re in luck. A minor tweak to your posture can vanquish your stage fright altogether.

Sitting up straighter was shown improve focus for fifty-six percent of students who participated in a study at San Francisco State University. The study asked the students to rate their test anxiety and the difficulty of solving math problems. Those who sat up straight reported less anxiety overall and had less difficulty solving the math problems than their slumped counterparts.

“For people who are anxious about math, posture makes a giant difference,” said Professor of Health Education Erik Peper. “The slumped-over position shuts them down and their brains do not work as well. They cannot think as clearly.”

So, the next time you’re facing a difficult exam or have to give a career-making presentation, check your posture. Take a moment to relax your shoulders, lift your chest and elongate your neck for a quick cognitive boost.

No. 2 Sitting up straighter trains your brain to be happy.

Do you struggle with negativity and pessimism? This is a natural tendency. Our brains are wired to assess our immediate surroundings for threats and then dispatch the danger as quickly as possible.

From a survival standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. The saber tooth tiger that’s about to eat you for dinner will have a bigger impact on your life expectancy than plotting out a farm that will feed your family for generations. We’re immediate gratification machines.

But, it’s also really easy to get stuck focusing on all the bad stuff that could happen. Psychologists call this catastrophizing.

If you’re trapped in this loop, you could benefit from a simple postural shift. Sitting up straighter helps you to recall more positive memories, or even just think more positive thoughts in general.

The next time you find yourself trapped in the downward spiral of positive thinking, do a little check in with your body position. Are you hunched and crunched or sitting up straight? For an added happiness boost, combine upright posture with a practice that steers your mind toward positivity, like keeping a gratitude journal.

No. 3 Power poses make you feel more confident.

If you missed the wave of “power posing” a few years ago, then you might be wondering why people are standing around in bathrooms before job interviews with their arms overhead in a victory-V.

Well, the science is in, and adopting expansive postures — think Wonder Woman or Superman — doesn’t just make you look confident. It actually affects your brain’s neurochemistry to not only trick you into feeling courageous, but also having the hormonal profile of a more self-assured person.

Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy showed that Wonder Woman-like “power poses” actually change the neurochemistry inside your brain to produce hormones that make you look and feel more confident.

Participants in Cuddy’s study who adopted more expansive postures tested higher for testosterone, a hormone related to confidence and security, while those who assumed slouched, crunched, or diminished postures showed elevated levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

Interestingly, yoga poses traditionally thought to ease anxiety are also all about taking up space. This is another example of science confirming hundreds-of-years-old practices (happens all the time, and I love it).

Making your body expansive signals to your brain that you are safe, you don’t need to curl up and protect your vital organs, and you can relax. It also opens your breathing and removes physical stress from your digestive system, which is great if you suffer from any kind of impaired gut health.

No. 4 Upright posture makes you feel more rested even if you got crap for sleep.

When researchers study the brain, they put people into a reclined position before sliding them into an MRI machine. Some clever scientists realized that body position might be influencing brain function, so they did a study to find out if that was true.

And, in fact, it was! People who sat up straighter had consistently better reaction times when performing memory tests regardless of sleep quality, while those who reclined showed diminished brain function after a poor night’s sleep.

It turns out that your body position influences your autonomic nervous system. That’s the part of your nervous system that regulates physiological functions which are beneath your voluntary control, like heart rate, breathing, and digestion.

So, if you’ve been tossing and turning all night but you still have to be “on” all day, skip the coffee and pay attention to your posture. Sitting up straight will assist your brain in staying online so you can focus even when you’re tired.

No. 5 Good posture gives your brain an energy boost.

Your brain runs on oxygen, which helps it convert glucose — basically, sugar — into fuel. Without oxygen, it can’t metabolize its primary source of energy, and brain function flags.

Despite only measuring at about 2% of your total body weight, your brain uses about 20% of your total oxygen intake.

You can survive for weeks without food, days without water, but oxygen? You’d die in a few minutes if you were completely deprived. While severe oxygen deprivation would result in brain damage or death, mild depletion impairs cognitive function.

And poor posture decreases oxygen intake. Slouching or rounding your back effectively crunches your rib cage, making it difficult for your lungs to expand. That means you’ll breathe more shallowly.

In fact, hunched shoulders and forward head posture can decrease lung capacity by as much as 30% — ouch! That has a serious impact on your energy and focus.

And there you have it! Five surprising ways that better posture actually boosts brain health. If that doesn’t have you sitting up a tiny bit taller, I don’t know what will.

Of course, there’s a sneaky secret about posture that most folks don’t know — and that is that usually when people try to get better posture they go about it all wrong. Typical advice revolves around straightening your spine and pulling your shoulders back, but this just makes you tense, uptight and ultimately exhausted.

Truly good posture — the kind that gives you unshakeable self-confidence — is all about ease. I go way in-depth on this in my ebook, Perfect Posture for Life. If you want a guide to getting good posture that not only lasts but also feels damn good, check out the ebook here >>

3 Pain Relief

3 Steps for Healing Trauma in Your Body

You may have heard that the body hangs onto emotions long after events have passed. Traumas from childhood — even seemingly minor things like a friend’s snide comment or your mother snapping at you one morning over breakfast — take root in your muscles and affect your thoughts well into adulthood.

But how does this cellular memory work?

The fact is, embodied memory isn’t some airy-fairy, woo-woo, magical phenomenon. It has real basis in your neurology. This makes a lot more sense when you reassess your view of the mind-body connection and realize that, in fact, your brain is embodied.

The Embodied Brain

Those three pounds of gray matter lodged between your ears don’t just stop at the base of your skull. Your neurons condense down into a thick rope that runs through the core of your vertebra. We call this the spinal cord, but it’s really just an extension of your brain.

And then that spinal cord branches out into thousands, maybe even millions, of tiny nerve fibers that innervate muscles, organs, joints, and bones. Your brain lives in your body exactly as much as it lives inside your head.

And here’s the really interesting thing: your body is sending data to your brain almost more often than your brain checks in with your body. The heart, for example, contains sensory nerve bundles that send information to the brain about nine times more frequently than the brain sends signals to the heart.

The Basis for Trauma

I’ll be honest, I don’t love the word “trauma.” Why? Because it’s really loaded. We have all kinds of conditions around what we consider to be a “traumatic experience.”

In reality, trauma is subjective. As psychologist Peter Levine says: trauma is in the nervous system, not the event.

Meaning: the event is actually irrelevant, and what actually matters is how the person processes the event. If a person has sufficient resources at the time of an accident, injury or emotionally charged event, their nervous system will undergo a normal activation followed by a discharge and then move on without negative impact.

Dr. Levine has observed this process in wild animals. A tiger chases a gazelle, and the prey manages to escape. After the tiger gives up and goes off to stalk his food elsewhere, the gazelle shakes her whole body, discharging the stored fear in her nervous system. Moments later, she’s calmly grazing with the rest of her herd.

As humans, however, we don’t always have sufficient time, space, or resources to process our traumatic experiences, and that’s when scars form in our bodies.

The Story Is Irrelevant

I know that can be really triggering for some people. Unfortunately, a lot of therapy focuses on the story so heavily that many people begin to identify with their past in a deep way.

They label themselves: I am traumatized. I had this horrible experience. Because I had this experience, I am damaged. And then that becomes part of their personal identity.

I’m not denigrating the negative experiences that people have. There are some terrible, heart-wrenching things that happen in the world. What I’m saying here is not that you should just buck up and be stoic but rather that we have to expand our treatment of trauma to include the body for whole-person healing.

Here are three steps to cellular healing that will clear painful emotions from your body.

1. Choose a memory.

The first step to embodied healing of your past is to select a memory that you would like to work with. I recommend starting with something small at first. You can make a brief list of emotionally charged memories and then categorize them as green, yellow and red.

Green memories are things you may have found irritating or annoying, but they don’t cause you alarm or panic. Yellow memories are a bit more charged. Red memories are those that you feel profoundly scarred you and affect your thoughts, beliefs, and current relationships in a very deep way.

Trust me, you don’t want to go for the gold on this one until you have your sea legs. Just start with a little memory until you get a feel for the process. In somatic healing, less is more.

I’m going to say that again for the overachievers in the room: less. is. more.

2. Feel it in your body.

Once you’ve selected a memory, mentally put yourself back into that situation. Maybe it was a friend saying something hurtful, or an offhand remark from a relative that cut you a bit too deeply. Or maybe it was a time when you fell off of your bike and scraped your knee.

Whatever the story, start to think of what happened before the event took place, and like a movie, play back the event in your mind’s cinema.

As you do this, shift your attention to your physical body. What do you notice happening? What parts of your body stiffen, tighten or respond as you recall this event?

List the sensations you feel without analyzing or judging them. Just describe them. Sensation is your body’s language, and the mind has a tendency to want to interject all kinds of interpretations on top of your body’s communication, so try to curb that.

Ask yourself, where do I feel this? How big is this sensation? Is it heavy or light? Does it have a color associated with it? Does it feel dull, sharp, jagged, ropey, thick or something else?

Once you have a clear sense of your body’s response to the memory, move on to step three.

3. Clear the memory.

This is where the magic happens. Now we’re going to clear the memory from your body. Because the mind loves to jump in and control things, we’re going to give it a mantra to keep it busy while the body does its healing work.

Gently put your attention on the sensation you identified in step two. Stay with that while you say, either in your head or out loud: I forgive you. Thank you. I’m sorry. I love you.

(h/t to Denise Duffield Thomas for this forgiveness mantra.)

With your awareness, track the sensation in your body. How is it changing and shifting? Note: it might get worse before it gets better. That’s okay.

If you need a break, just shift your attention to the feeling of your feet on the floor. Open your eyes and take in your surroundings. Once you feel calm and centered again, you can return to the practice.

Remember, less is more. Don’t gut it out — seriously. You don’t have to suffer in order to heal.

While repeating the mantra and focusing your attention on your body, I find it very helpful to alternate gentle tapping on the top of my head and on my sternum. While tapping is widely used in ancient healing practices, I learned this one from Bodytalk.

Theoretically, tapping the head stimulates the brain to build new connections, and tapping on the heart “saves” this information in your body. Does it really work?

As Denise Duffield Thomas says (total side note, her book is awesome, highly recommend), who cares! All of it helps a little bit.

Anyway, continue focusing, tapping and mantra-ing until you feel the sensation in your body shift, dissipate and dissolve. If you’ve selected a green-light memory, this may go very quickly. Or, you may discover that what you thought was a green-light memory is actually covering a snake pit of red memories.

No worries. The tension in your body doesn’t have to dissolve completely. If it does, fantastic, but even a tiny shift toward relaxation is progress.

When you feel the tension dissipate, you can stop tapping and mantra-ing. Open your eyes and notice how you feel overall.

Bonus Points

Now is a good time to create a more constructive mantra to take the place of this old story you’ve just cleared. Choose something positive, avoiding words like “don’t,” “won’t,” and “can’t.”

While syntax does play a role in your brain’s ability to process negative words, positive statements take less energy to interpret.

If you’re stuck, here are a few good basics:

I am safe.

Every cell in my body is completely healthy.

I am a kind and loving person.

I am doing my best, and that is good enough.

For extra credit with this mantra, revisit step two above. As you repeat these words over and over to yourself, what do you notice happening in your body? Do your muscles relax, your jaw stop clenching? How does your breath respond?

Spend time reveling in these positive sensations. This is more than just a mind exercise. Pleasurable physical sensations signal to your brain that you’re safe and that you can relax. They activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for rest and digestion.

Living in parasympathetic rather than in chronic sympathetic — fight or flight — lockdown also boosts creativity, deepens interpersonal relationships and empathy, improves gut function, slows heart rate, decreases blood pressure and generally improves your mental and physical well-being.

Parasympathetic is where you want to live on a daily basis for optimal focus, energy, and happiness.

To Go Deeper, Get Support

Whew. That was a lot.

If you want to go deeper with this practice, I recommend adding intentional movement into the mix. Here’s the thing: when trauma takes up residency in your body, usually that can be seen as frozen places that don’t move well.

Over time, the muscles in this area become tense, stiff, dehydrated (like beef jerky — really, it’s kind of icky) and ultimately painful. Then, most people get this random advice to stretch more. That’s great. We should all move and stretch a lot daily.

The problem is, you’ve got this giant frozen area of your body that your nervous system can’t access. It’s like a piece of you went missing.

(And yes, this has distinct parallels to soul death or soul loss as viewed from traditional shamanic healing practices.)

You can go to the gym and do yoga and even get contortion-level bendy but still not move through and release these frozen areas of your body.

I work with yogis, weight lifters, crossfitters, circus arts performers and even contortionists all. the. time.

They still have these frozen areas in their bodies. They all benefit from this intentional defrosting of their muscles.

The truth is that exercising simply isn’t enough. To really, truly, fully release frozen areas of your body, you have to kind of sneak up on them in a non-threatening way. Seriously. I know that sounds weird, but think of it this way:

The trauma in your nervous system is a scared cat. You’ve seen one of these before — eyes wide, jerky movements, tense all over, crouching and cowering, ready to run for safety if you should even so much as breathe wrong.

You’re going to walk up to that scared cat and pick it up. (Substitute dog, bunny, horse, or whatever other animal you love if you’re not a cat person.)

(Maybe not horse. Those are too big to pick up.)

Do you run up to the animal with big movement yelling loudly how much you love it? Probably not. It’s going to run away.

Instead, you approach quietly, softly, speaking in low tones. You may avert your eyes. You certainly don’t broadcast “I’m going to pick you up” body language. You’re in stealth mode.

Well, your nervous system needs the same quiet, cautious, reassuring treatment in order to feel safe enough to release deeply held scars. Anything less will only perpetuate the tension and the problem.

So, what do we do about all of this? This is precisely why I created the videos in my Posture Rehab course. On the surface, it’s about standing up straighter. But these practices communicate deeply to your nervous system, gently dissolving all those old patterns that you’ve been holding onto for years — maybe even decades.

posture rehab buy now

Why videos? Let me be frank: the hands-on work that I do in my practice is life changing. But, not everyone can come to see me. And, in all honesty, this process is not a one and done kind of deal.

You don’t lift weights once and suddenly you’re strong. One yoga class does not a yogi make. Well, one bodywork session doesn’t dissolve your entire life history, either.

Practice makes perfect. You can take this process as deep as you would like. There is always a new level of healing available if you would like to grow there, but fortunately the basics work at every level.

And that’s why the videos. Because you need access to these not for a week or a month or a year, but for a lifetime. Because this process is life changing, if you let it be.

Right now, I’m offering access to 31 body-healing practices personally led by me for $295, which is less than the cost of two in-person sessions with me.

If you’re just so over being stuck in your past, and if you’re looking for something that works differently from everything you’ve tried before, click here to buy the Posture Rehab program now >>

Seriously, you have nothing to lose, except your limitations.

9 Posture

Do Posture Correctors Really Work?

Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links. 

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a client about all the various posture correcting devices on the market designed to help you stand up straighter. From shoulder braces to high-tech wearables that buzz when you slump over, the options are endless.

She wanted to know: do posture correctors really work? And if better posture is on your wishlist, I’ll bet you’re wondering, too.

It seems great, right? A brace to hold your shoulders back, a gentle buzz to remind you to sit up straight…but what you don’t know about posture correctors could actually be hurting you…and your pocket book.

Related:

So before you go shelling out $80 (or more!) for posture training devices, here’s everything you need to know from a posture pro about whether these things really do their jobs.

Posture Braces

What they are:

Soft, elastic material that wraps around the front of your shoulders and attaches around your rib cage.

What they’re supposed to do:

Hold your shoulders back and keep you from slouching or hunching over.

Cost:

$25-$40

Do they work?

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of posture braces of any kind. Why? Because your body is designed to move, and no joint is more inherently mobile than your shoulder.

The humerus — or upper arm bone — attaches to the shoulder in a very shallow ball and socket joint. It’s so shallow, in fact, that it’s easy to dislocate. Your hip, also a ball and socket joint, is so much deeper than the shoulder. When you see the two next to each other, it’s easy to understand that the shoulder joint is meant for uninhibited movement.

Additionally, the shoulder girdle — which is what we call the bones of the shoulder that sit on your rib cage — basically hangs in a hammock of muscles. Your shoulder only has one bony attachment to the rest of your body where your collar bone meets your sternum.

Again, the shoulder is meant to move. Hunched over shoulders aren’t actually a shoulder problem at all — they’re a rib cage problem. Shoulders merely rest on the rib cage like  glass on a table. If the rib cage is caddywompus, the shoulder will be, too — just like a glass set on a wobbly table will also be unstable.

Posture braces that pull shoulders back don’t fix the root problem — a collapsed rib cage. And worse, they inhibit shoulder mobility, promoting unnecessary tension.

The verdict:

Don’t buy one.

A better option:

KT tape gives you the same proprioceptive nudge as a posture brace while still allowing free movement and range of motion in the joint.

Posture Wearables

What they are:

Tech devices that you wear on your back to monitor slouching.

What they’re supposed to do:

Wearable tech posture training devices provide a gentle vibration when your body rounds forward, reminding you to sit up straight.

Cost:

$80

Do they work?

Here’s my problem with these devices (okay, a couple of the problems I see): they in no way provide input on how the person achieves upright posture. They simply measure the position of the device.

I’ve been practicing with real clients — real, live human bodies — for nearly fifteen years now. Let me tell you, if you ask a person to sit up straight, it’ll reveal some interesting neural patterns. We all think we know what straight is, but many people are still sitting on a tucked-under tailbone, hyperextending their lower backs, or craning their necks to hold up collapsed rib cages.

These devices say that 92% of users report improvements to posture when worn. I’m asking: how is this measured? Is it based on app reports of how often the device needs to buzz at you to make you “sit up straight?”

Because that’s not a really great metric. A wearable that truly measured posture would take into account way more than just the position of your upper spine. It would assess lumbar curve, pelvic orientation, muscular engagement of the lower back, and so many more data points.

Also, holding your body in an upright position frankly isn’t all that useful. Of course, culturally speaking, we have a very rigid definition of posture. We assume it’s a snapshot on the cover of a magazine. But the reality is that posture is a mode of expression. Yes, it’s influenced by your daily activities, be they sitting in front of a computer, driving for hours, weight lifting, yoga, running or anything else.

But posture is dynamic. It’s the result of a lifetime of neural conditioning. Good posture isn’t about holding one single static position for hours on end, it’s about having a multitude of options.

In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that posture is a terrible metric for physical health. It doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on back pain, either. Why? Because when we’re measuring “posture,” we’re measuring something static.

(It should be noted that posture does matter, but it requires a bit of a shift in how we understand what posture actually is.)

The verdict:

Nope, don’t like ‘em. Your money would be better spent on a luxurious dinner out.

A better option:

Consult a pro, someone who can realistically assess your body and help your brain find new, more efficient neural pathways so you don’t have to constantly “mind” your posture.

Also, set up a more ergonomic workstation.

Lumbar Support Cushions

What they are:

Pillows that work to support the lumbar curve of your lower back.

What they’re supposed to do:

Alleviate pain by making it easier to sit up straight, thereby taking strain off of the muscles of your lower back

Cost:

$15-30

Do they work?

Here’s the thing about lumbar supports: they’re behind your body, meaning you have to lean backwards to get any benefit. When you’re sitting in an upright position, the weight of your body compresses downwards, not backwards.

So, lumbar supports do work, but only if you’re already reclining and not sitting up straight. I’ve found that, in general, lumbar supports tend to promote slouching rather than correct it.

Also, due to the over reliance on hip flexors in daily activities (sitting), most people already have too much lumbar curve.

The verdict:

Not worth it.

A better option:

Most people would benefit more from learning how to sit properly in the first place. Lumbar supports are only helpful to correct already poorly set up workstations. Simply raising a person’s seat so that their hips are above their knees will do wonders for lower back strain.

The Bottom Line

Ugh, are you feeling a little depressed that posture correctors aren’t worth their hype? I feel ya. I know what it’s like to want to fix your body in the worst way but not know exactly where to turn.

The good news is that fixing poor posture actually isn’t all that hard once you understand a few basic principles.

That’s why I wrote my ebook Perfect Posture for Life sharing nearly fifteen years of clinical expertise and nitty-gritty how-to on posture correction. These are the lessons I’ve learned from working with real live clients just like you who were frustrated with hunched shoulders, lower back pain, and stiff necks.

You can check it out by clicking here.

1 Pain Relief

You don’t have to suffer from stiff muscles and aching joints

Over and over again, I hear this from my clients: “I have been to physical therapy, tried yoga and Pilates, seen a chiropractor and had massages, but by far the best results I’ve found have been from working with you.”

Why do I get results for people suffering with back pain, stiff necks, tense shoulders, sciatica, scoliosis, and a bunch of other uncomfortable conditions when other methods fall short?

While I’d love to tell you I’ve got some sort of exclusive magic, the truth is it’s a lot simpler than that. The reason this work works is because I focus on the nervous system.

The Neural Factor

You see, muscles aren’t just meaty rubber bands that randomly get tight for no reason. Your muscles are controlled by a sophisticated software system — your brain. It’s nerve signals that tell muscles to contract or relax.

The problem is that accidents, injuries and chronic stress all contribute to muscle tension, and over time tension becomes the habit — your default neural set point.

Ever heard the saying “everywhere you go, there you are?”

Well, everything you do, there’s your neural pattern. So when you plant your hands in down dog or crank out a Pilates 100, you’re activating your unique neural pathways — almost like a personal movement signature.

That’s why traditional approaches often make good changes initially but sort of plateau at some point along the line. You get stuck in your own neural patterning. In order to break through this plateau and restore flexibility, you have to create new neural pathways.

A Different Approach to Improving Mobility

Fortunately, it’s a lot easier than it sounds. While this is the basis of the work that I do one on one with clients, there are also exercises that you can do on your own at home.

They’re easy, require virtually no equipment, and you can start to see changes in five to ten minutes (that’s about the same length of time it would take to watch two adorable cat videos on Facebook, for reference).

This is why I created Posture Rehab, a video suite designed to dissolve tension in your body and hit the reset button on your brain. That way, you can stand taller and move freely without tension, aches and pains.

Sound good to you? Click here for everything you need to know about the program — what’s included, a complete table of contents, FAQ, etc.

Posture Rehab isn’t yoga or Pilates — and it’s not designed to replace these practices either, but rather support them so you get more benefit out of doing them.

Learn more >>

The Bottom Line

Listen, daily pain that saps your energy, degrades your focus, makes you cringe when your kid jumps into your arms, and wakes you up at night does not have to be your reality — no matter what your age. You can feel good in your body.

In fact, you have the right to feel amazing. Life is ridiculously short. Don’t spend your precious days in a fog of pain, limited by what your body can — and can’t — do.

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2 Posture

3 Exercises to Strengthen Your Core for Better Posture

Core strength has been a buzz topic in the fitness world for a number of years now with everyone from personal trainers and physical therapists to medical doctors recommending abdominal exercises to those suffering from back, neck and shoulder pain.

But you might be surprised to know that most people are doing it wrong and actually causing more posture problems, pain, and tight muscles. Eek!

So should you stop doing core strengthening exercises altogether? Well, no. Core strength is important for good posture, a strong spine and overall physical health. But you want to make sure you’re doing the right exercises to strengthen your core without causing more damage to your body.

Here are my top three core strengthening exercises that everyone should be doing:

No. 1 Overhead Carry

Why It Works

The whole point of core strength is to support your body in movement. Basically, you want whatever you’re doing in the gym to translate to real life, and frankly, exercises that isolate the muscles of your trunk don’t really help you schlepp three bags of groceries, a toddler, and a 7 lb laptop from 2006 up three flights of stairs, balancing the whole lot while you fish your keys out of your bag to pry open the front door.

A truly strong core allows movement to travel through it. There is a difference between strong and resilient and just plain braced. A braced core will restrict spinal mobility, which ultimately leads to stiffness, back pain, muscle spasms and potentially even spinal injuries like bulging discs and nerve impingements.

Carrying a weight overhead teaches your body how to maintain core integrity while simultaneously allowing movement to travel through your trunk.

How to Do It

Choose a weight that’s challenging but doable for about 20-40 yards. Anything will work for this practice: dumbbells, kettlebells, weight plates, cans of soup. Get creative!

Put one weight in each hand and then either put both hands overhead or position one arm overhead and let the other hang at your side as though you were carrying a bucket.

Then, just go for a walk! Keep your abs engaged as you walk to support your lower back, drawing your belly button inward and upward slightly, but don’t brace so tightly that your hips get stiff and make walking difficult.

Walk 20 yards and if you have your hands in the alternating position, switch sides so the down hand is now carrying weight overhead. Walk another 20 yards. Do 3-5 sets, resting as needed and increasing the distance as you get stronger.

Bonus Points

Use a liquid weight. Filling a vessel with water and carrying overhead adds additional instability that your core has to accommodate. The water sloshes as you walk, making whatever you’re carrying effectively much heavier than its scale weight.

Plus, it’ll whittle inches off your waist! Back when I was competing in kettlebell sport, I would warm up by overhead carrying a keg filled with water around the block. I have never had such a well-defined waist; this exercise really targets your obliques. And no, I never did so much as one sit up, crunch, dead bug, or other such “core exercise.”

Kegs are a good option if you can find an old one (plus, fun for a few double takes from the neighbors). Start with one gallon of water and work up. You could also use those plastic five gallon water jugs, or even a milk jug in either hand.

Sand bags (or grain bags, cat litter, dog food, etc.) would also be a good challenge as they’re also an unstable weight that adds additional difficulty.

No. 2 Side Plank

Why It Works

I’m not a huge fan of plank-planks, as in regular planks on your elbows or hands. I know, sacrilege, right?! Planks are the holy grail of core strength. So, why am I against them?

There are two reasons I don’t love plank-planks, as I call them. One is that they strengthen the anterior line of the body — the flexion line (the muscles that would contract to curl you into the fetal position). Most people are already short on this line due to our flexion addicted society (sitting, way too much sitting).

The second reason is that it’s a static pose. See: overhead carry, above. A truly strong core — not just a tense core — translates movement from the legs through the trunk, shoulders and out the top of the head. A braced core just doesn’t allow this to happen, and that’s where I see a lot of back pain starting.

But side plank? Well now, that’s different. Yes, it’s still a static pose, and for that I’ll demote a few merits. But it’s a good pose because it targets muscles that rarely see any use in modern daily life. It does, in effect, “turn them on,” teaching the brain how to engage the muscles along your sides.

This is helpful because it corrects a common muscle imbalance — the over-reliance on hip flexors and stomach muscles for support and locomotion. And, in fact, one study, albeit small and somewhat poorly conducted, showed that daily side planks reduced scoliosis curvature by around 40%.

What we can glean from this is that activating the muscles along the sides of your spine helps to promote spinal integrity by teaching your body how to hold itself in a more balanced position. This ultimately does translate to better posture in your daily life because it means your muscles will work to keep you upright of their own accord without you having to nanny them with constant attention.

How to Do It:

Side planks are, fortunately, easy for anyone to do (barring injury or other contraindication, of course, check with your doc first in that case) and require no equipment.

Simply get on the floor. Lie on your side and place one hand on the floor under your shoulder. Lift your hips off the floor, stacking your feet on top of each other.

If you can’t support your body on your hand, you can do side plank on your elbow and forearm instead, and if that’s still too much, balance on your knees instead of your feet.

Hold for three sets of 30 seconds on each side, working up to at least a minute at a time. While some doctors suggest only side planking on the weaker side to correct imbalances, I’m not a fan of asymmetrical training.

Instead, only side plank for as long as you can on your weaker side, even if that’ means it’s easy on the strong side. Eventually, the two sides will catch up and be more balanced.

No. 3 Kettlebell Windmill

Why It Works

Most “core” strengthening exercises get conflated with “abdominal bracing,” but as I’ve mentioned, your core needs to be strong, and at the same time, to move. Strength is the ability of a muscle to contract — with control — along its entire length.

The kettlebell windmill is the ultimate exercise for developing such strength + mobility. It both engages your abdominal, back and spinal muscles and also increases hip flexibility. And it feels sooooo good!

This is absolutely the exercise you want to do to avoid that dreaded “I threw my back out” moment where you reach down to swipe something innocuous off the floor like a child’s toy and suddenly there’s a ridiculously sharp stabbing pain your back and you’ve lost the ability to stand up straight.

We don’t want any of that, so grab yourself a kettlebell and get to windmilling!

How to Do It:

Technically you can do this exercise with a dumbbell, too. I prefer kettlebells both because they sit well in your hand and because the weight hangs off center on the back of your arm, upping the ante for your core. It’s more difficult to support an off-center weight. But really, when has your bag of groceries ever been perfectly balanced? The world is an imperfect place, and we should train for it.

Grab your weight — most people will be able to start with a kettlebell ranging from 8 kilos (16 lbs) to 12 kilos (26 lbs). The right weight should be a little challenging to balance but not so heavy that you feel like you’re going to drop it.

Place the weight in one hand and raise the arm overhead. Space your feet wider than shoulder width. If the weight is in your right hand, shift your weight over your right foot and slowly lower your torso to the left until your left hand can touch your left foot. Return to upright.

Check out this video for a visual.

Exercises to Avoid

A lot of core exercises technically target the core, but are a waste of time. Some don’t translate to better function in daily life. Others are downright dangerous because they simply contribute to isometric bracing that, over time, results in spinal degeneration.

Planks are on the list, as mentioned above, as are most types of sit ups, leg lifts, crunches and other such “ab exercises.” You can find a more complete guide to core strength as it relates to posture in the Perfect Posture for Life ebook. Once you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s a lot easier to select the right exercises and strike the ones that are time wasters.