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Why Strong Muscles Matter More Than Perfect Posture · Making Muscle Memories

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode of Making Muscle Memories, I want to talk with you about why stronger muscles are more important than having perfect posture.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So if you were someone that is constantly worried about your posture, or maybe people are telling you that you're slouching all the time, this episode is for you.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: After 40 years of work in the fitness industry, I have learned that real strength isn't just built through exercise, but through experience.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I will share with you some of the science as well as the stories that have shaped my work.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We are all building muscle memories.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: One rep, one story, and one day at a time.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Making Muscle Memories.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Lauren Irk and I will be your host.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, I'm going to dive into posture and what your posture is telling you about the state of your muscular system.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if we think about the idea of posture, I think a lot of people will immediately think we're talking about static posture.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The posture we use when we're sitting in a chair, standing up, or whatever.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I know from being a fitness presenter, I've been a conference presenter for many, many years.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember in almost every single conference I've ever been in, there's always a session that somebody is doing about posture.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow the having poor posture is causing injury, it's causing pain, it's problematic, and that it's something that we need to fix.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember being in the audience in the very beginning, even before I even started presenting, and thinking to myself, okay, I'm going to sit here and watch this presenter fix this person's posture.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then the presenter would say things like, you know, lift your chest, move your shoulders back, suck in your stomach, step your feet apart, all the things that this person would have to do.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Tuck your chin, drop your shoulders.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the person would follow those things, but then as I was watching that person on stage, within a matter of seconds, those cues went away.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I always thought to myself, well, what good does that do?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it is very, very true.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we can't hold perfect posture, right?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: What are the reasons for it?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if if we look at the word posture, I think we have to really look at is there's a dynamic posture and there's a static posture.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's a posture that we use and we're holding still, trying to brace ourselves, maybe while other things are moving.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also a posture that we can take on while we're moving that we call dynamic.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Our muscular system deals with posture according to what is best for our central nervous system.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when we have a posture that requires less energy, we're gonna take that.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: If we have a posture that requires less stress on our joints, we're gonna take that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: If there's a posture that helps our muscles not have to deal with so much inflammation or force application, we're gonna take that.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Our body is trying to be as efficient as possible.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, posture can be talked about certainly from the physical standpoint, in the fact that our body is sort of reacting from some environmental stimuli.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have a posture when we're holding something heavy on one side of our body.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have a posture when we're in the cold.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: We have a posture when we're walking across an unstable surface versus a stable surface.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: We have a posture when we're standing on one leg, and we have a different posture when we're standing on two legs.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: But posture can also be something that we're holding from emotional reasons.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I have a posture based on my stance on something.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: My posture according to global warming is different than maybe someone else's posture.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe my political ideologies are the way that I'm going to posture myself in a specific argument or a specific amount of news.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's a specific type of a mental attitude that I'm taking towards posture.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we can use posture to influence other people, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that may be the very reason that someone is holding their posture a specific way.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I rescue animals, and I always see I have cats right now in my house, and I have more than one.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've watched, there's always this dominant cat, and the younger cats will always, you know, roll over on their belly or on their back rather to expose their belly during play, and it's obvious to the more dominant cat that, oh, I have control over this, and I know that animals do this on purpose.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've also seen parents posturing over their children, you know, with their hands on their hips or giving a stern look or leaning over them while they're sitting down low.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's a way of posturing, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about posture in this episode, we are going to talk primarily about the role of the physical body because that's what this whole podcast is about.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's about muscles.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Before I get into the science of this, I want to tell you a story about a situation that I was in once in my 30s.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was asked to work in a facility where there were a lot of PhDs and they were dealing with psychology, and they wanted to bring a health professional in that could teach alternative practices to their patients.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I owned a yoga studio, and so they knew being a business owner that I might be someone they might want to talk to.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So they arranged a lunch and I came in.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: When I came in, I was surrounded with a bunch of suits, and of course, I walked in in my fitness attire.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't maybe, you know, super sloppy, but I definitely had, you know, I think it was in the winter time, so I had like a sweatshirt on or something.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were all sitting around, and I certainly look like the fitness person.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was one woman that really took a like I could tell that she just really didn't like me.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe I might have been imagining it, but I could really tell that she didn't like me.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when we were talking about the idea of doing yoga and what that would look like with their patients, she tried to give me an example of how posture is important to her patients.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so she came up from behind another one of the psychologists, put their hands on the show on her shoulders, and said, I will oftentimes move someone's shoulders back, and then she put her knee against the middle of her shoulder blades and have them sit up straight to try to help them to feel more confident about themselves.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I and if it for the for a minute I kind of thought, well, yes, that is true.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think if someone stands up taller, they generally reflect more confidence, they reflect more happiness, they reflect more, you know, uh maybe control over the situation, versus if someone comes in and they're sort of rounded and dejected, they're going to portray exactly the opposite.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I could kind of see our point, but I got really triggered, and I was like trying not to say anything, but I got really triggered because I thought, how do you know what this person is dealing with?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you just walked over to this person and pulled their shoulders back.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it wasn't the time or the place to get into this, but it is now.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here it is, like 20 years later.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about why somebody holds themselves the way that they are, I always think about the way that someone has a posture.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is to me a force conversation, right?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this is because this is my scope of practice.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am not a psychologist.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Although I deal with people's emotions in sessions and whatnot, I am not a psychologist.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So my scope is always the physical body and I apply forces, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I know that every person that I that I'm going to work with, and if you're a trainer or a fitness professional, this is what we all deal with.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: We are dealing with force applications, and gravity is the number one force that we have to focus on.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: This force that drops down against us in a vertical line that puts pressure on us that's trying to push us into the center of the earth.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so how we resist gravity is very important.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly if we decide we're going to pick up another piece of mass or redistribute, re-redistribute our own mass, our own center of mass, this creates different postures.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this really came a I became aware of this hugely when I was doing yoga teacher training and just teaching yoga in general.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not familiar with practice of yoga, and I'm talking in terms of Hatha yoga, which is the yoga, the branch of yoga with postures, there are hundreds of different postures that are delineated as being yoga, right?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so many people, when they're signing up for a course or a teacher training or whatever, their goal is over a period of time, I want my body to approach that posture as much as possible.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so they will go to teachers, workshops, secrets, they will buy props, tools, things to lay their bodies over, anything possible to try to get their bodies into that pose because in yoga it is considered to be, you know, proper if you're closer and closer to that form.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I always ask myself, like, well, why?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like what makes that posture better than something else?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: What made that position get a name for a pose?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is downward dog look like an upside down V instead of being on your hands and knees?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that puppy pose?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have all these different names for things.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I always used to tell my students when they were coming through my teacher training, I always used to say, I don't care what poses you can get into, I want to explore how your body moves because you're gonna learn how to explore your students' bodies and how they're gonna be able to move.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always said that the poses that are that are sort of handed down in the methodology of Hatha Yoga was really just a person's practice.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they just sort of got to name it, you know, like they were like the grandchild that got to name Gaga the grandmother and the grandfather's name, and all the other grandchildren had to go by those names because somebody else got to name them first.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, we all exist in very many positions inside of those postures.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so the goal of yoga maybe not be the poses, but to feel, you know, if that were my body's capabilities of doing that, what would that require?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And how many different subtle adjustments would I need to make to use that as a template, and how could that benefit me, if that makes sense?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think about posture, and this can this can be not just yoga, but let's say I'm holding something heavy on one side of my body.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: You see a kid and they're holding a big heavy backpack and they slung it over one shoulder.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: This was me in college, right?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't refusing to put it on two of shoulder, it had to be on one because that was cooler.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was always leaning over to one side because I was trying to balance that bag over my center of gravity, my center of mass.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes back to the idea of the fact that muscles are creating the posture.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, like having that heavy backpack on, it was causing one side of my spine to have to work differently than the other.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: For me to not collapse over is putting different forces across my hips, my glutes.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking about as I was walking through space, all the little minor adjustments that my foot and ankle has to make.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we do this all day long.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: We consider posture and its influence, gravity and its influence, other pieces of equipment or centers of mass changes or whatever, we're constantly adjusting based on our goal.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when this posture becomes what we have all the time?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say that person that's always has a heavy backpack on one side, or the person that's always sitting in a desk, or the person that spends, you know, six years being pregnant and wonders why they have back pain afterwards.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the thing about your body is that depending on what it's experienced, and I I can even go back to what the psychologist has experienced, even though, again, I want to say I am not a psychologist and I don't have the authority to talk about this.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is just my opinion.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: If someone's experienced a trauma over a period of time, trauma can be from emotional, it can be from physical, it can be from chemical.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: That person's now posture may be permanent or there or close to permanent.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we may have to figure out as a health professional, or even if you are dealing with this yourself, how am I going to fit exercise or my life in general inside of that posture so that my body, my nervous system, doesn't just freak out, right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say that someone has stenosis.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, stenosis is considered to be the narrowing of the intravertebral canal.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is the the area behind the body of the vertebra where that opening is created from the pedicle, the transverse processes, the lamina, and the spinous processes, that opening where the cord comes through.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, and through those spinal foramina, the nerve roots can exit.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as we have muscle dysfunction, which can come from aging, overuse, underuse, not picking enough load up, not or doing too much load, whatever, this can cause our bones to change.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happens is when that that opening starts to narrow or become more arthritic from bone spurs, whatever, collapsing of joints, wedging of vertebra, whatever it is, it causes pressure on the spinal cord to be sometimes debilitating, sometimes it can't even be fixed.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so you look at that person in the grocery store and they're leaning over their grocery cart, and you would think, well, sit up straight.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for them, sitting up straight is not an option.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I always say to people like that, our goal is not necessarily to just straighten you up.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: What if this person has scoliosis by birth?
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Our goal is not to be straight, but maybe to keep it from getting worse.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: That might be a better goal.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But posture itself and how this person is holding their posture is a very complex thing.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: When we take into the emotional component of it, the physical component, the historical component of it, no two people are ever going to have the same posture.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, I feel like that's kind of important.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now we think about the idea of can we adapt?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Can we change our posture, thinking, well gosh, I guess I'm screwed.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna be able to change my posture.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not true.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you some hope.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: We have something called muscles, and even though we know as we age we lose muscles at a percentage every year, sometimes even more, depending on how sedentary we become or bedridden or whatever, we can change this.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in my program, the Fitness Integrated Science on Demand, I use a lot of isometrics.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Isometrics are all about creating stability.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: Stability.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Stability is about holding things.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's about being static, it's about creating a muscle contraction at a specific joint position, learning how to contract the muscles there, and then learning how to brace joints.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: We can't do this, we can't do any kind of lifting or moving or anything until we learn how to be strong and stable.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great example in the Bible in Matthew 7, and Jesus talks about building your house on sand.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: When we build our house on sand, like when we we start to do all these crazy things, or we walk up to our client and pull their shoulders back, or we try to force them to sit up straight, or have you lay on your back so we can get your back straight.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: We are building a house on sand.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know why this person is holding their structure the way that it is.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when the storms come and the violent winds shake, that house is going to fall.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we need to build our house on rock, just like that verse, that passage in the Bible.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: We need to build our house on rock.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: We need to take the necessary steps to build strength in our perispinal muscles, our pelvic floor muscles, our transverse abdominus muscles, our glutes, our hamstrings, our ankles, our feet, our shoulders, our spine, our ribs, the muscles that attach to our rib cage.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: We need to develop that strong, stable support so we can keep our muscles strong over a period of time throughout our life.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that needs to be consistent and it needs to be gentle in nature so that our body is able to do it for a lifetime.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not so too challenging that we just blow our nervous system to smithereens and we can't do anything about it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: What I hope that I've given you today is some hope.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I hope I've given you hope, right?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And as you're listening to this, you're like, you know what?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Posture is a thing, but I don't have to be stuck here and I don't have to continue to get worse.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: I could take the necessary steps today to improve my posture for nothing alone for the health of my spine or for my own confidence or so that I don't continuously shrink as I age.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And for my muscle minute, I'm going to say that good posture is not something that you hold.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is something that your muscles create.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to create better posture, work on first of all identifying your weak links, secondly, taking the steps to eliminate those weak links, and thirdly, taking steps to integrate and strengthen those weak links to where they are no longer weak anymore.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you would like more help to understand how to do this in a progressive, step-by-step manner, I do have a seven-day strength experience inside of FIS on demand that is completely free that I will take you through this process and maybe this will give you some good ideas about how to get stronger because my the whole reason I'm even doing this podcast is to help people.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to see people just accept aging and say, well, this is the way it is.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna age and this is the way my body's gonna do it.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, you can do this, you can age better.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if this episode helped you, please forward it to someone else.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you're watching this on YouTube right now, please give me a thumbs up, like and subscribe, and please leave a comment.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know what this has done or if you have any questions about anything.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as always, I hope that you have enjoyed this, whether you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to these podcasts, listen to it often and let it be an inspiration for you because I know you can age like a boss.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you on the next episode.