all right so for most of my life I've had pretty bad posture I often work long days at my desk and I don't exercise enough and so I struggle to sit upright but recently I spoke to health expert and fitness coach Dan go about how anyone can have perfect posture and what perfect posture actually means so there's a big myth around posture so we first talk about the biggest myth around posture and then we go through the three key exercises you can do to improve your posture oh and by the way if you're new here hi my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and writer and the author of Feelgood productivity which is about how to be more productive in a way that feels good but let's dive into this posture stuff so the myth of posture is the fact that there is a perfect posture in the first place there's two types of posture that people usually talk about which is number one is going to be sitting and the other one is going to be standing so when it comes to sitting everyone thinks that oh my gosh like you have to stand with your shoulder blades back and you have to be like perfectly tight you have to have something stuck up your butt so you kind of like remain in that position and your the the string has to be pulling your neck this way but what we're seeing with a lot of studies is the fact that the next posture that you're in is the best one the one that you're most comfortable in is the best one and usually what that means is it means like switching up the way in which you're sitting every like 15 to 20 minutes all right so there's this quote that says your best posture is your next posture and this goes against a lot of what we see online in the health space and even what we're told by some doctors so we're told to sit up straight or stand up straight and not to slouch in our CC and have like our shoulders back and our chest out and we're told this not because the science says that this is the right thing to do but because it looks good or because some people say it helps prevent things like lower back pain now when it comes to standing the myth is is that you have to stand straight all the time and your shoulder blades have to be back and your chest has to be high and your your back has to be like activated when it comes to standing what we're looking for is the aesthetic of what good posture looks like the truth is that everyone is going to have a different look to how they stand so it really seems like we need to change the way that we think about posture so this is a paper published in the Journal of orthopedic and sports physical therapy and it's titled sit up straight time to reevaluate and here are some of the key takeaways from that paper so firstly there is no single correct posture and this makes sense because we're all different shapes and sizes and our spines curve differently so one size fits all approach just isn't logical secondly you should adopt more comfortable postures and this may well involve sitting with a slight slouch on your sofa or at your desk if that feels more comfortable thirdly we need to remember that the spine is robust and can be trusted and fourthly moving and changing position can be helpful so like Dan said small adjustments every 15 minutes or so is pretty good and we often do this without even thinking about it because it feels totally normal and if you think about it staying in one rigid upright position is actually kind of painful and can actually worsen lower back pain because you're not able to relax your muscles I was also quite surprised to hear from Dan that good posture doesn't actually correlate with athletic performance does good posture actually relate to having some sort of like performance benefit and I'm going to say no it doesn't it's largely this aesthetic thing at least from what we're seeing in the evidence so what people want is this look of aesthetically looking like you have good posture which allows you to be taller it gives you an extra inch of height but in reality it's like everyone has different posture and it doesn't mean that because they may look a little bit more like Hunchback than others that they perform worse you might actually find that you know performance is going to differ between people who have different types of posture and everyone's body is different that's the thing that we have to realize so the key takea away from Dan and also from these papers is that there is no such thing as the perfect posture it is more about how you feel but this does not mean that there aren't things that we can do to improve our posture from an aesthetic perspective and so in the next part of this video we're going to look at what Dan feels are the three best exercises that we can all do to improve our posture oh by the way if you're enjoying this video so far then you might like to subscribe to brilliant who are the sponsor of today's video brilliant is an interactive platform where you can learn maths and programming and AI they've got 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days then head over to brilliant.org Al abdal or click on the link in the video description and that will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription so thank you so much brilliant for sponsoring this video all right so exercise number one is all about grip strength and this little device is called a hand dynamometer and basically you just squeeze it as hard as you possibly can and it measures your grip strength and this graph for example shows how your grip strength changes over time as we get older for both males and females our grip strength is at its best when we're in our 30s and 40s which is pretty cool for me as I've just turned 30 and so I was very curious to hear from Dan about how I can improve my grip strength there are actually three great exercises that you can do in order to improve your posture number one is going to be bar hangs and I'm not talking about hanging at the bar with your with your friends or what we did yesterday but it's literally just getting like a pull-up bar and just hanging from it and there are two ways to do bar hangs there's the passive way where you're just hanging from a bar and allowing kind of like your lats to stretch you're allowing your spine to decompress and then there's What's called the active hang which is where you're hanging on from a bar but then you're also getting yourself into what we call like you know proper posture which is like pulling your shoulder blades back and activating your upper back and then that is the more advanced way of doing a bar hang that's going to help activate your upper back it's going to pull your shoulder blades play back and it's going to help you achieve that look of good posture when you're standing now the really cool thing here is that grip strength is an excellent indicator of overall health including our risk of things like diabetes and dementia and even in some studies longevity which is kind of weird right like why would the the the the strength with which you can grip a thing correlate with all these different Health outcomes but according to some of the research grip strength is now considered a biomarker of aging and this study from 2022 was the first to show that people with weaker grip strength age at a faster rate compared to people with a stronger grip and they did this by comparing your chronological age so that's just the number that you can see along the x-axis and we compared that with biological age which was estimated using a technique called DNA methylation there'll be a link to the source down below if you want to check it out we're not going to go into it now this is what the line Looks like for stronger grip strength and this is what the line Looks like for weaker grip strength and the difference between these two lines is essentially the difference in your rate of Aging so if you have a weaker grip strength over time as your chronological age increases I.E as you become older your biological age actually increases more compared to if you have a stronger grip strength now something else that's really interesting is that grip strength is an easy way to get an insight into your overall muscle strength so that's the strength basically in the rest of your body for example this study looked to see if there was a correlation between grip strength relative to your body size and lower back pain and when they controlled for things like age and sex and smoking and physical activity and things like that they found that weak grip strength increases your risk of lower back pain compared to people with a strong grip so if you have good grip strength then it has a bunch of different benefits firstly you increase your chances of living longer and decrease your risk of various diseases or at least it's correlated in that way secondly you're more likely to have a stronger upper body stronger back and stronger body overall thirdly you are less likely to develop back pain because you're strengthening all the muscles around to support your back in theory and fourthly you improve your posture as a result of all of the above so with the bar hang one of the main things that it's doing is it is stretching out your lats the other thing that's doing is also decompressing your spine so a lot of times when people have poor posture it is due to the fact that their lower back feels very sore or the fact that feeling pain in the lower back so they're kind of like hunched over so through hanging from a bar you're just employing gravity uh to your advantage and gravity is just allowing your spine to decompress as you're hanging from that bar now this is how Dan suggests we can start getting better at bar hangs when it comes to the bar hangs for beginners especially for people who can't necessarily hold themselves up the thing I like to do with them is I like them to hang from a bar but also to have their feet lightly touching a surface just to make sure that they are giving themselves enough uh grip onto the bar where it's challenging enough but not to the point where they can't grip the bar at all so beginers should be aiming for any anywhere between 30 I would say 15 to 30 seconds of the bar hang uh for people who are a little bit more advanced you should be aiming for 1 minute and if you really want to be elite at a bar hang you want to be aiming for at least like 2 minutes now for me personally I can just about bar hang for about 1 minute but I'm aiming for 90 seconds and slow slowly inching that up over time and I'm finding I'm getting calluses in my hand hands but like brown is good for me you should be doing bar hangs I would say it's like probably one of the best things to do is like every single day yeah doing a bar hang every every day if you can't do a bar hang every day do it like three times a week if you can't do it three times a week then do it once a week and if you're anything like me and you like seeing numbers go up over time it's a nice thing it gives us a feeling of progress progress feels good it's one of the whole philosophies of feel good productivity find a way to experience progress so I like tracking my bar hang numbers over time and the app I use for that is strong no affiliation no paid partnership I just think it's a cool app all right so exercise number two is all to do with our glutes so one of the things that people don't realize about posure is all is is a lot about how strong your glutes are so when your glutes are strong what happens is is that you're able to stand tall your glutes are able to actually do a lot of the movements for you whether it becomes standing or walking the glutes are supposed to be the second most powerful muscle in your body the first one is going to be your jaw but in a lot of people especially when they sit down for long periods of time their glutes they don't necessarily turn off but they just get more week they atrophy over the course of sitting over the course of Modern Life where it requires us to sit for anywhere between 6 to 8 hours a day so one of the things that we want to do is we want to activate those glutes now one of the first things you can do to start working on your glutes is an exercise that doesn't need any fancy equipment at the gym and it's something you can just do at home on the floor if you're a complete beginner and you don't have access to a barbell then glute bridges are going to be fantastic I love to do this thing called glute Bridge holds and it's where you are doing glute bridge but you're also holding it for about anywhere between 5 to 10 seconds what that does is it helps increase the amount of glute endurance or muscular endurance that you have and that's one of the ways in which to start activating the glutes all right so Dan got me to do this glute Bridge test which tests how strong your glutes are in the first place so you do 15 glute Bridges and you assess where you feel the strain is it in your glutes or is it in your cords or your hamstrings so if you're feeling this uh this exercise in anywhere but the glutes you can say you can actually say that your supporting muscles are doing some of the work outside of the glutes being the main muscle that you want to activate now what I find is with a lot of clients when they're doing something like this they are actually finding that the quadriceps are getting strained before the glutes do and to me that is a sign that their glutes are significantly weaker than their quadriceps which is not what you want to have happen so I asked then how often should I be doing these glute Bridges I like to do those glute Bridges every single morning upon wake and the reason I like to do that is because number one it's just going to remind my glutes to actually activate in the first place and also uh for me I come from a history of chronic lower back pain so this is just to me one of the mandatory exercises that I have to do to make sure that my glutes are activated to make sure I'm using them throughout the day and also just to make sure that I'm also relieving any kind of like tightness that I would have in my lower back as a result of doing them now I don't do these as often as I would like to but when I do do them I find that there's it feels like there's a release in my lower back which kind of feels feels kind of nice but then if you do have access to a gym or a barbell or weights or a machine or whatever then hip thrusts are a really good thing to do and hip thrusts are fantastic because you can use Progressive overload what we call Progressive overload which is just adding weight to the bar and then ever so often what you're going to do is you're going to do this it's basically like a glute Bridge you're doing it on a bench but you're using a barbell to lift the weight up the other thing is is every single week that you go to the gym and you're doing these hip thrusts you're going to add just like a little bit of weight to what you're doing this is going to increase the strength and also the muscularity of your glutes and then that is going to go a long way in making sure that you're walking and also standing with nice and Tall posture oh by the way if you're enjoying this video so far then you might like to subscribe to Sunday Snippets this is a completely free email that I send out every Sunday where I talk through what I'm reading and what I'm learning as I'm reading and learning it now for example when it comes to health stuff I have a personal trainer I have a health coach I talk to a lot of people about health but it takes like months for us to make one of these YouTube videos so if you'd like to be a little bit more in the know of like ooh here's a technique that I found to improve my step count or here's some tech that I found that's really helpful you know that's the sort of stuff I share in this newsletter it's completely free you can unsubscribe anytime head over to Ali ABD dal.com Sunday or there'll be a link down below if you want to check it out and finally we come to exercise number three exercise number three is what is called a face pull so a face pull what it's doing is it's allowing you to just retract your shoulder blades back and also activate your thoracic spine and upper back and it's basically like a face pull you're basically pulling a cable in into your face as if you're pulling this cable into your face it's called face pull it's going to be working your romboid it's going to be working your thoracic spine and also from a posture perspective is going to be working the areas of your body that allow you to stand tall in the first place now basically every personal trainer I've ever had has taken a look at my kind of Hunchback laptop kind of guy posture and has recognized that my RM boids are weak which is why they've all recommended doing this sort of face pull stuff and I've been doing that with my own personal trainer a lot and like people like friends and family have been commenting that I look a bit more jacked and my posture seems to be better and I think that's because my RM boids are sort of pulling my shoulders back now that's not to say that there is a perfect posture or anything like that it just looks a bit more aesthetic when you're sort of like you've got you know should shoulders back rather than shoulders forward you know that kind of thing how to do this at home is uh get a resistance band and just put a resistance band uh onto a you want to attach it to something which is not going to you know you don't want to attach it to something where it's going to slap in your face you but we put this uh resistance band in the loop and then all we're do is using the face pull using the resistance band if it is at a gem then you're going to be using a cable machine uh usually with a rope attachment to pull the face ball back anyway the Big takeway from this video is that there is no perfect posture and the most important thing you can do to improve your posture indirectly and for aesthetic reasons is to work on your strength and really this is what all three of these exercises do if you work on your strength by strengthening your grip your glutes and your core then your posture will just sort itself out as a byproduct of you getting stronger overall now if you enjoyed this video then you also hopefully enjoy this one that I made recently about three powerful habits that you can use each day to improve your health that's also a bit of a dive into the research around what actually works from a science back perspective so I hope you enjoyed that video thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye-bye