Fix Bad Posture in 22 Days (BETTER POSTURE GUARANTEED!)

what's up guys jeff cavaliere athletenext.com if you're not crazy about your posture but you really want to do something about it we're on the right video because i promise you if you do what i show you here in the next 22 days you're going to be standing taller feeling better and looking better in pictures because let's face it when our posture is bad it doesn't look very good but that being said there are six areas that we need to focus on because these are the big ones these are the ones that trip up almost all

of us and we're talking about the thoracic spine the hamstrings and the calves on the back side and on the front side we're looking at the abs the hip flexors and hip rotators so what i'm going to do is i'm going to give you a test for each of these areas to determine if it's one of your weak spots and if it is i'm not going to leave you hanging i'm going to give you a step-by-step day by day plan with stretches and exercises to make sure that you turn this deficit into a strength of

yours and correct your posture along the way so that being said let's start looking at how these 22 days are going to break down all right so the way these 22 days shake out is we're going to start on day one with a test day and i'm going to show you in a second here what those individual tests are going to be to help you to determine whether or not you have a deficit in any of the six areas i just mentioned but the important thing is that we have to work on them so whether

or not you have all six let's say three or maybe even just one you're still going to have some work to do over the course of the 22 days the next 21 days are basically comprised of alternating focuses of stretches for your tight areas and then exercises to strengthen these areas to make sure that these problems don't come back again on the final day day 22 that's when we get to have some fun because we go back again and compare where you are then versus where you are now and see how much better your posture

is then you realize that all your work was worth it now the first place i like to start is where i believe most of us have the most problems and that is with the thoracic spine all this texting and working on computers all the time has got some big problems in terms of the amount of flexion of our thoracic spine we need to be able to extend and extend a lot and we've lost that ability so we have to test that i have something called the wall splat test you approach a wall and you stand

with your feet six inches away from the wall now from this point you put your hands at the 11 o'clock in the one o'clock position on that wall and you simply just squat down now the goal is to see if you can get all the way to depth with your thighs parallel to the ground if you can't it's a failure see because all these tests are going to be pass fail either you can or you can't now let's say you actually can get to depth but if your hands come off the wall or worse you

fall backwards then that would also be a failure in order to pass this test you have to be able to get all the way down to parallel with your hands in contact with the wall and your balance fully intact all right so let's say this is an area that you do not pass in how does this work well as i said on day two we're focusing on the stretching for your areas of deficit well what this is an area of deficit your stretch you're gonna focus on is this kneeling stretch for the thoracic spine where

you put your elbows up onto a bench or a couch and then drop your chest down as much as you can and sit back on your heels this will drive you into more thoracic extension and actually stretch one of the secondary muscles that tends to get tight because of this positioning of your spine and that's the lats all you want to do is sit and hold this position for 45 seconds for three or four reps now on the alternate day you're doing your strengthening for this area and what we want to do is we want

to reinforce the fact that the muscles on this back side here have likely gotten weak because they're in that prolonged stretch position well guess what comes into the rescue here the face pull as always to do the face pull you simply pull your arms back behind you trying to have your thumbs beat your elbows you don't want to pull with your elbows and have your thumb stay out in front of you you want to ideally have your arms in almost this 90 degree position and hold that position for a brief second to make sure that

the muscles in that area of your upper back are getting worked now if you don't have access to a band and you still want to play along you can do the bodyweight face pull version that you see down here again using a door frame and simply pulling your arms back the same way to work these muscles and make sure that they're strong enough to counteract the tightnesses that you've been dealing with next up on our testing list i mentioned was the hamstrings so how do we assess this with this test right here it's called the

toe touch test but not this see a lot of people think that testing their hamstring flexibility is just bending forward and touching their toes not if you're allowing your low back to round like this and go into a posterior tilt to really assess your hamstring length you have to get into an anterior tilt and the best way to do it is with a hinge so you can see if you dangle your hands in front of you and then hinge back as far as you possibly can maintaining that slight arch in your low back now i

want to know can you touch your toes and if you can't once again it would be a fail and you would make sure you include the exercises and stretches in your 22-day program so now if that was you and you needed to address your hamstrings in your 22-day program what would you do well on your stretching days this is your stretch you simply step into the wall making sure to put your foot up on the wall to get an additional stretch on your calves and from here now you reach your hands up high on the

wall as you try to basically walk your chest straight ahead into the wall this is all being done with that anterior tilt of the pelvis right making sure that you have that arch in your low back and all you want to do is hold this for 45 seconds in that stretch position for four reps on both the right and the left leg and now for your exercise days with your tight hamstrings you want to focus on what's going on in the opposite side of the joint so instead of looking at those hip extenders we're going

to look at those deep hip flexors in this case the psoas so to target this muscle all we have to do is stand close to a box with our foot flat on top of it could be a staircase if that's what you have the idea is you want your hip to be just above 90 degrees as you see here and all your job is is to simply lift your knee up higher even if just by another three or four inches and hold that position without holding on to anything for balance to be able to do

this you're going to want to extend through that opposite hip and contract the glute on the opposite side but the key is just to be able to get into this position hold it for three or four seconds and lower down you perform these for the prescribed number of sets and reps and make sure you work both sides once again test number three is going to deal with the calves so what we need to do is this test here is called the knee touch test and once again we stand six inches away from the wall and

your goal is to try to keep your heel planted the entire time and allow your knee to drift forward and touch the wall a failure on this test would be that you either cannot get your knee to the wall or if you do your heel pops up off the ground neither one of those is acceptable you need to be able to touch the knee to the wall with that heel still fully in contact with the ground now this turns out to be an area that you need to work on then your stretching days will consist

of the following an ankle drop stretch and here we have two variations you see we want to work on both muscles of the lower leg the gastroc and the soleus so to do that we simply stand in this position with our knees locked out straight and just allow our heels to drop down as far as our flexibility will allow us you hold the stretches as always for 45 seconds four times on each leg but we also want to get that soleus and the best way to do this is simply to bend the knee and repeat

for 45 seconds on both sides now once again understanding that what happens on one side of a joint is going to affect what happens on the other we get to address a muscle that oftentimes gets completely overlooked and it's the anterior tib and the way we do this is we want to strengthen this muscle that never gets strengthened but there is a caveat here you don't want to do it every single time you do your strength days you want to do it on every other one because rushing into this type of work when you never

do it can lead to shin splints so what do you have to do you simply sit down on your butt you anchor a band of something in front of you wrap it around your foot and then scoop back until you have tension on the band and all you're going to do here is simply allow your foot to drop down into plantar flexion and then pull back against the resistance of the band to strengthen that anterior tip muscle and to help to cement the gains and flexibility that you're going to get from your stretching days on

your ankle and now we shift our focus around to the front side and we work on the abs you're probably saying yourself but jeff what if i don't even have abs don't worry we all have abdominal muscles you don't have to be able to see them for them to be tight and the way to test this is with the press-up test and the goal here is to get into a full press-up position without doing one of two things you don't want your hips to pop up off of the ground and of course as i said

you want to be able to get your elbows fully extended if either one of these occur your hips pop up or your elbows don't go straight then you failed this test and you would need to work on this you want to be able to get all the way up with the hips staying in contact with the ground in order to pass if tight abs are something you're dealing with now then what are you going to do on your stretching days either you do this bow stretch which will require you being able to hang on something

ideally a pull-up bar in your own doorway and what you do is you simply grab hold and then drop your feet back and allow your body to just sink in and enjoy the stretch okay maybe enjoy is a bad word it sucks but it will work and what you're doing is you're just trying to allow your pelvis to drop and really stretch out that front side as always 45 seconds four times if you'd rather do this with a physio ball and you have access to one you do the following you simply get in position on

top of one drop your hips down as much as you can and then lean back over the curvature of the ball the idea is either one of these will work whichever one you have access to and find your ability to be consistent with it so now if apps are an area of focus your strength days will look like this you're going to have to include the superman exercise to help to address the issues we've already talked about see not only reinforcing that extra stretch on the rectus abdominis but more importantly strengthening the lumbar paraspinals the

muscles that have weakened as a result of this chronic tightness on the front side you do this for the prescribed number of sets and reps on every single strength day over the course of your 22 day plan next we slide our focus down to the hip flexors we test it with something called the thomas test and what we're looking for here is as you pull one knee to your chest does the opposite leg and thigh get all the way down parallel to whatever you're laying on if it doesn't then you likely have tightness here and

your hip flexors or something you want to do something about alternatively maybe you get your thigh all the way down but if in doing so you have to compensate and get into a big arch in your low back then once again that's not doing it right so in either case the arch or not getting your thigh down to the surface will be a failure meaning you have to do something about this we can tackle this problem head on with something called the reverse lunge and reach and this is one of my absolute favorite ways to

stretch the hip flexors and caution again not everybody will have tight hip flexors just feeling tight here doesn't necessarily mean that you're tight it could mean that you're stiff and dealing with an entirely different issue i actually did a whole video on why hip flexor tightness is not a given unless you test it with something like the thomas test of course you want to do this on the side that you're tight likely both for 45 seconds for four reps every time and as we've been doing all along here if we want to complement what we're

doing from a flexibility standpoint we've got to get that strengthening component in and once again we're going to attack that opposite side of the joint this time the hamstrings and the glutes and we can do this with our glute bridge heel tap the knee that's bent is going to primarily be using the glute to drive us up into hip extension and as we step out with the opposite leg and extend that knee out we're going to shift that load a little bit more dynamically to the hamstrings either way we're strengthening both of those posterior chain

muscles that are going to be critical to help to get this problem to go away once and for all and now sticking with the hips i want you to sit down and try this test out it's called the seated hip crossover test and all you're trying to do is place the ankle of one leg on the opposite knee and what we're looking for is for that shin to be able to get completely parallel to the floor meaning the leg can go completely flat even if you have to push on it just a little bit if

your leg does not get flat if it sticks up in the air at all like jesse's here then i would consider that a failed test and it's something that you need to work on if those hip internal rotators are extremely tight then you're going to need to do something about it and on stretching day you have something called a pretzel stretch and it mirrors very much what we did sitting in a chair except this time you're laying on your back the fact is it's gonna feel very much the same as it did when sitting and

it gives you an opportunity to work on this 45 seconds at a time over four reps on whatever legs are affected and of course to address the strengthening side of this guys the hip internal rotation tightness is going to likely lead to a chronic weakness of the hip external rotators but we can hit them really really effectively with this exercise here it's the frog glute press so what we do is we land on our back in this frog like positioning of our legs by placing the soles of our feet together with our heels dragged as

close as we can to our butt and we press up into the bridge from here the shift of the focus from the glute max to the glute medius the hip external rotators is something that you're going to feel right away you're going to feel much weaker here especially again if you've been dealing with chronic tightness of those hip internal rotators but the one-two combo of stretching them out and strengthening the opposite side of the joint is gonna be what helps you to get over this problem once and for all so now remember your 22-day plan

may not look like your friends and that's okay because this is specific to you it's based upon how you performed on each of these tests and what you need to work on and remember guys if you put the work in i promise you your postural improvements are going to be there for you when you test again on day 22. and so if you're excited about the improvements you're going to make in the next 22 days and want to embark on some others make sure you check out how to get six-pack abs in 22 days and

also on how to increase your push-ups and 22-day workouts all step-by-step laid out for you guys everything i do is laid out step by step so that you never make any mistakes along the way all of our programs do just that they're available over at the next.com in the meantime if you found the video helpful leave your comments and thumbs up below and make sure you click subscribe and turn your notifications so you never miss a new video when we put one out see you soon