 You're tuning in to the fastest growing fitness, health and entertainment podcast on YouTube in the world. This is Mind Pump. Look, before I tell you about this episode, let me tell you about something real cool. If you leave a comment under this video and you're one of the first 30 comments and Doug, our producer, picks your comment. So he's got to like your comment. If he picks it and you're one of the first 30, look at what you get. You get this cool t-shirt right here. Brand new Mind Pump media t-shirt. Now, here's the deal with this shirt. It has muscle building and fat burning properties. It, putting it on will make you leaner and makes you sexier, or at least you'll appear that way, or I'm making it up. It's just a nice t-shirt. I think that's what it is. It's just a nice t-shirt, but I get all kinds of crazy messages. People, it blows their mind when they put on this amazing t-shirt for leaving a comment. Also, don't forget to subscribe to this channel, turn on your notifications so you know when we post a video so you can win a t-shirt. We have other giveaways. All right. So today's episode, we talk about posture. We talk about the importance of evaluating your posture, how to do it. Then we talk about the exercises that you can do, movements you can do to make your posture better so that you can make your exercises more effective. Okay, so it's not just about getting better posture or reducing your risk of injury. Those are great, by the way. It's also about making your body move better so your squats, your benches, your deadlifts, your overhead presses become much more effective. And we give you a three-step thing you can do. So it's three steps. Take those three steps, follow them, and you will improve your posture. We give you everything you need in today's episode. Also, one more thing before the episode starts. This month, we're running a promotion on two of our programs. We put them together. We call it the Phase 2 Bundle. It's MAPS Performance and MAPS Aesthetic. So one of them is an athletic, functional-based workout program. It's about three months long. The other one is a bodybuilder focus program. It's also about three to four months long. Combine them both. You get the Phase 2 Bundle and you get amazing results. Normally, if you get these programs at retail, you can spend about almost $300. But right now, you can get them both in this bundle for $79.99. That's it. One-time payment. Just got to go to mapsfebruary.com. That's M-A-P-S-F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y.com. Go check them out and sign up. You know what? I need to do a little, either an Instagram or a YouTube clip, because I do... Do you guys ever see me do the posture check thing that I do? It's like real simple. You put your hands by your side, you lift up, go in front of you, retract up, down, thing. No. It's like this simple little... Remember when I showed you guys the squat stance where you lay on your back and you do it? Oh yeah. It tells you where you should put your feet when you squat. Yeah. It's not precise. But it's a cool way to show people a good starting position. There's a posture check thing that I used to do with clients all the time to get them to understand how out of alignment they are. Over time, if you haven't been paying attention to this, a lot of people don't realize how bad of posture they have. They recognize they have aches, they have pains, they're getting older, stuff like that. But not everybody makes the connection that like, oh I have really bad posture. Part of that's hard to see yourself. It is. And it's also part of it. It's a slow process. It's not like you go from good posture to bad posture in a day. It's a slow boil and then one day you've got bad posture after 10, 15 years or whatever and you have no idea. You know, it's funny. I've seen so many different types of assessments that trainers can do for clients. And the goal of an assessment is to give a trainer... There's a couple of reasons why we do assessments. One is so we can mold and modify the way we communicate how we'll help the person. Obviously I'm not going to communicate the same information to two different people who have two different types of assessments. It would make no sense. And the second reason is give me a starting point. So it would be like, you know, you take your car into the mechanic and you say it's making this knocking noise and the mechanic does nothing to check your engine and then just starts taking things apart. That would be like a trainer not doing an assessment. So assessments are part of what we would do as trainers and I've seen lots of different assessments. And one thing that's in most if not all assessments is a posture evaluation. In fact, I can't think of... Can you guys think of any certifications you did where there wasn't a posture assessment? I think that would be ridiculous. A lot of times they don't call it that though, right? It'll be a squat assessment or a wall test or a windmill test. A lot of times it doesn't say like, this is a posture test. I don't know, some trainers don't communicate that well either. That this is what we're doing is that a lot of times clients come in, they do that. Or this is my experience, I should say, right? My experience with trainers working for me, giving a squat assessment on clients, they didn't always break it down correctly. It was like, oh, this is... You want to perform a... We need to learn how to squat better. You're not doing it well. Here's the areas that we need to work on. Not like, hey, I used to do... Now me, I used to do this little posture check and then I would show them, have them do it and be like, this is the anatomical position. So I'd be standing like all your... You remember all your anatomy books where the skeleton is standing in this perfect position with their palms out or whatever. And I would explain to them that, I'd get them in that position and then I'd say, hold that posture right there. And all of them, okay, everybody would feel be like, oh my God, this feels weird or this is uncomfortable. And I'd go, isn't that crazy that perfect posture for you feels uncomfortable and weird? And that's because for so many years, you haven't been addressing this and this is part of why we can't squat well, we can't overhead press well, you have low back pain, your knees bother you, your neck bothers you, is because our posture is out of alignment and all the stress is going to your joints instead of being distributed evenly through your body and carried with your muscles. Yeah, it's actually pretty interesting. Like if I was to go back, I mean, and simplify it like completely and just take somebody and, okay, well, let's just take you up against a wall, something that's like completely vertical and flat and can provide feedback as to what can actually touch the wall altogether. A lot of people will realize immediately whether or not they have forward head, whether or not they have protracted shoulders, whether or not they have all these things going forward they didn't even realize because they couldn't really see themselves in that light. Yeah, you know what I like about posture assessments is it's, because here's the thing, when you tell somebody to do something, consciously they're trying to do it right, but when you just tell someone to stand, they stand the way that they always stand and so it tells you quite a bit, right? So if I tell someone, hey, do me a favor, stand up straight, then they'll start to all of a sudden try to correct their posture. If you say, hey, can you stand right here for a second and just be relaxed? Then I walk around you and I can see what your natural posture is and your natural posture can tell me quite a few things. Now, it's not going to tell me everything, but it does tell me some stuff. Some of the common things that you would see, and these are things that I would see in almost everybody, which is kind of funny. I'm going to go over some of what were called posture deviations, right? And you see them, at least one of them in everybody in most people and usually there's more than one. One of the more common ones you actually said protracted shoulder, that's forward shoulder. It actually sounds, it looks the way that it sounds, right? So your shoulders are kind of rolled forward. So that's a common posture deviation and it's probably common because we work on computers, we sit at desks, we sit in chairs all the time and so it's one of the more common ones. Along with that, typically is forward head. That's where the head jets out. That one's becoming much more common and worse, especially in kids. I never saw a forward head in kids and now I see it in almost every kid and again I think it's because they're always on their computer screens. Again, like it sounds, the head kind of jets forward. By the way, forward shoulder typically is accompanied by neck tightness and sometimes pain in the upper back, forward head, also neck tightness and strain and sometimes headaches, you get these tension headaches because every time you move your head forward just from the leverage it becomes much heavier because of the support. Then you have the pelvis, right? The anterior pelvic tilt where your butt sticks out. So all that affects, yeah, that it goes down the kinetic chain and you can find problems in your hips and how they're trying to adjust to, you know, to... Compensate. To counter and compensate it. Absolutely. If one thing's leading forward, something else has to lean back to balance you out type of deal, right? So you have the pelvis where the butt can stick out. You have the strong arch in the back. That's an anterior pelvic tilt. Then you have a posterior pelvic tilt that's tucked kind of underneath and then you can look all the way down to the feet. Typically I'll have someone take their shoes off and I'll look at the feet and you'll have feet that'll either flatten which is pronate or supinate which is not as common but still you see it sometimes where the feet kind of turn out. All those things are telling me something about that person's body because your body, your joints, your spine moves through the path of least resistance. So if some muscles are weak or some other areas are tight, it's gonna form and shape itself to those things. And so your posture tends to tell you that. And you can see all those just by standing. You can see somebody in the way that they're carrying their posture just in a standing position but then you add any sort of movement to that and it's really gonna get exaggerated. You're gonna be able to see a lot more clearly how your body is compensated by organizing itself to produce this type of movement. You can see that in walking patterns. You can see that in squatting. You can see that in windmills and these other types of exercises that really highlight these things. Now I wanna ask you guys something early in this episode so we can address it because I know there's a big portion of the fitness community especially in the strength side that doesn't quite subscribe to this as being of importance. Their theory or idea on this is that everybody has such a different morphology that everyone's so unique that trying to address and correct and do all these little tedious movements and exercises to fix someone's posture is a waste of time. They just need to move more, squat more, deadlift more. What do you say to that? Yeah, I've heard this argument a lot especially being in with a lot of strength coaches too. I've noticed there's a mentality whether or not you first get somebody and you're trying to address a lot of these or you're trying to then cue the person through movements to get the adjustments to sharpen the actual overall movement of it which in my opinion has a lot of flaws in that philosophy. Yeah, I think they're going too extreme. So yes, chasing perfect anatomical posture like you would see in a textbook might be silly because people are different but we're not so different that you can't tell that somebody has bad posture and someone has good posture. We're all humans, right? We all walk on two feet and you know what it looks like when someone's got a hunchback to make it extreme so it's very easy for me to say your posture's probably causing you problems so I think it's... Now here's a case that they're trying to make that this doesn't solve everything. I agree with that. It doesn't solve everything but it is an important piece of the puzzle. Also look at the population, the portion of population that they tend to work with. These people are working with athletes, strength athletes, and in many cases, better posture doesn't necessarily make you perform better in a sport. I'll give you an example. If you are a boxer, you're going to train more of a forward shoulder because you're... And not only that, but you're also shrugging your shoulders quite a bit. You're covering your chin. You're walking forward. If you ever watch a boxer stand and move, you'll see some of that forward shoulder. Well, that benefits that particular sport. When you're talking to the average person who has no intentions of competing at a super high level in sport, this is a very important thing because posture affects how you feel. This is a fact. Number one, it affects you physically. If you have posture that's not... It's less than ideal for yourself, leverage points change, compensations happen, and you start to develop... The terminology would be like overactive muscles. Basically, what it feels like is areas get tight. If you have areas of your body that you tend to always get knots and you need to massage them out, it's probably because there's an imbalance there. If you have lots of tension in your neck or if your knee tends to bother you a particular way, there's an imbalance there. So that's number one. There's the physical feeling of less than ideal posture that can feel kind of bad. And the worse your posture is, the worse that that gets. Here's the second thing. Does posture affect you emotionally? It does. Studies show that how you feel internally affects your posture. So if you're sad, if you're shy, or if you won a competition or you lost a competition, that will all affect how you position yourself. In fact, right now I could paint a picture and we'd all imagine what this person would look like. Imagine a insecure teenage girl, forward shoulder, hunched down, kind of covering herself, probably wearing a sweater, hair in front of her face, type of deal, right? So how you feel on the inside affects your posture, but does your posture affect how you feel on the inside? Studies say yes also. In fact, just standing more upright sends a signal inside to the brain that says, we're feeling more energy, we're feeling more confident, things are safer, therefore we should start to feel better. So when we're scared, we tend to crouch in. When we're more confident, we tend to bring things out. The victory pose, that's universal among humans, arms up above their head. Tony Robbins talks about this all the time. Now what are you doing? You're exposing your weak areas, but you're showing the world essentially, this is what the theory is, that you're confident, you're strong, right? Just doing this tells the brain that you feel confident and strong. In fact, when I would train clients, I used to love doing exercises that would correct their posture, because here's what happens, when you do an exercise that corrects posture, it goes away, it's not permanent, it takes a while to make it permanent, but right away, if I activate certain muscles and loosen others up, just like if I stretch your hamstrings, you'll get some immediate flexibility, right? It goes away, but if you do it over time, it becomes permanent, but I used to love doing this with clients, I would correct their posture and it would take me 10 minutes or I'd do something for a posture for 10 minutes, and then afterwards they'd say, how do you feel? And they'd be like, oh my God, I feel more energetic, or I feel better, or wow, I feel more open, it definitely affects how you feel. Yeah, well, back to our, you know, talk about like, you know, the coaches that want to kind of adjust based off of cues and that versus like actually adjusting, you know, your posture and trying to eliminate a lot of the imbalances. The thing about, it's competing, it's performance goals require a lot more effort on skill acquisition, and skill acquisition, you're only going to get from repetitive patterns to really mastery of these repetitive patterns. The only thing is there's a window to that. And so as you get to this point, your body will form into this position which then may, you know, contribute to pain and injury, you know, further on down the road. So, you know, to add more balance to that doesn't necessarily add to your performance, but it adds to, you know, the overall, you know, optimal health and function of the joint. Now another hurdle that I remember having as a trainer talking to clients about posture was what do you guys say to a client that is so focused on building muscle or losing body fat and the fear of if I work on posture and that's all we're doing in here is corrective exercise, like, I really, Adam, I just want to lose 30 pounds or I just, I want to get buff. It's going to take me longer to build muscle. Yeah, so how do you guys respond to that? Yeah, no, it's not true. So, number one, correcting posture does involve exercise. You're still working out. You're still exercising. It actually helps me pick better exercises for your body. Obviously, fixing posture issues is going to reduce risk of injury and pain. That's a good thing. But let's just imagine that your bad posture never resulted in pain or injury, which it will, but let's just imagine in a magic land that it doesn't. Are there still benefits to working on those things? There are. Because when you can move better, you get more benefit. You get more bang for each exercise that you do. So, a squat that's done properly with good stability, good control, and a longer range of motion because you have good mobility, you have good control, is going to give you more generally overall than one that's done with a shorter range of motion with less mobility and with, you know, worse posture, if you will, or posture deviations. So, you are, what you're doing by working on this is being able to make every exercise that you do more effective for your body. So, does it build more muscle and then, you know, does it also burn more body fat as a side effect to move better and to correct your individual posture issues or deviations? It does. It absolutely does, especially in the long term, especially in the long term. You talk to anybody who's been working out for a long time and you ask them what's the number one thing that stopped you from progressing and they'll all say I hurt myself or I had to stop bench pressing or I had to stop squatting or dead lifting. I couldn't do this amazing effective exercise because of pain or whatever. Well, I mean, how would you like to dramatically reduce the risk of that happening? So, it's very important that you do this kind of stuff. You know, it's like building a house. You've got to have a good foundation. Otherwise yeah, you'll have a fast house that's built but in a couple of years, it's going to be like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's going to be, you know, sideways. I used to always also like to, you know, when I did that posture check, I'd love to do it in front of a mirror so I could show them how much better, because most people, let's be honest, come into the gym because they want to look better. Initially, what drives them in there, very few are like, I just want to live a healthy life out of most people come in because they're insecure about the way they look and they want to change that, whether they know they are or not. Their goals are to lose body fat or build muscle to look better. And I used to love to take them and do that posture check in front of the mirror to just show them how much better I can make them look in five seconds just by getting them to stand upright and be able to explain that. Listen, you can build all the muscle in the world on this frame or lose all the body fat but if your posture sucks, it's only going to look so good on you but if you stand upright, you'd be surprised how good you look just from that alone. It's a total visual cue. Yeah, it's a great point. I remember doing that all the time and just like adjusting hips and showing some of my female clients how flat their stomach actually is and it's just the way that they're carrying themselves and presenting themselves a lot of times that they look at themselves and they'll have this sort of deflating type of feeling by looking at that but it's really just like, it's such a confidence builder when you're presenting yourself with good posture, everybody notices that. Yeah, no, it's a total visual cue and then on the other end of this, we all have known or seen the guy in the gym that is the meat head, builds the muscle but has bad movement patterns and even has bad posture. I remember there was one guy who used to work out one of my gyms and he loved doing pull-ups and pull-downs a lot of them and he had an incredible lat spread, right? So he had these great massive lats, terrible upper mid-back activation and I could tell because he had such crazy forward shoulder, probably exaggerated by the fact that he was always trying to show off his lats but when you see him in person move around and we've all seen these people in the gym, they're built but they don't move right, they don't look right. In fact they look like the stereotype of the muscle-bound type of person. So it is very much a visual cue and you can build a bunch of armor around bad movement patterns and bad posture. In fact if you do that, it makes it a lot harder to correct. It's easier to fix problems when there's not all this strength that's built around bad movement patterns and bad posture. So you want to definitely make this a focus. I'll give you an example I had a client, I've talked about this kid a couple of times, I had a client who his dad hired me to train him by the time he came to see me he was 17 years old, was a pitcher in high school. I mean this kid could throw serious heat and he brought him to me because high level colleges were going to start scouting him because he could throw so hard so fast. But he'd been pitching for so long it did nothing to counteract that repetitive motion that he was so imbalanced between his two sides it was incredible I would have him do a row and it was like, I mean if I put like a divider in his back you would think it was two different, totally two different people was that causing him problems? It was in fact he would continuously injure himself because of it. One of the reasons why he brought him to me was because he kept hurting himself when I did the assessment I was like holy cow we have a lot of work that we need to do. Now how he started with some of this stuff through that career of pitching would he have run into those problems? No I don't think so not at all. Some of my favorite clients to help with posture stuff is many times I would get a guy who is middle aged and wants to build a physique and wants to build his chest but has shoulder surgery or has shoulder issues and so has completely avoided chest and so I would get this question of, Adam I have this going on with my shoulder and so I can't bench press I can't do this I can't do all these movements but I want to build a chest what do I do and you know helping them and a lot of times when you have either had surgery there or had an issue an injury what is why people can no longer do things like bench press isn't because the shoulder no longer works it's just not an optimal position they haven't addressed it or when they went through their rehab they didn't finish the work that they should have finished off and got them back into proper alignment so that the shoulder tracks correctly when they do a bench press just getting that client to get their shoulder in the optimal position to where they could bench press again would change like everything for them I loved helping people with shoulder stuff Yeah so I mean think of any kind of machinery that's got a track on it you can even think of like a sliding glass door if it's lined up perfectly that slider that track is going to last a long time now if it's off balance if it's pushing in one direction inches or whatever the track is off it's going to wear that track down very quickly now you could grease the hell out of it you could you know every other day go down there spray some WD-40 with it but over it's going to just continue to chew up that track because it's applying pressure in a way that essentially it's not being used optimally or it's not moving optimally this is your body right so your joints have optimal ways of moving they also and anything outside of that is considered suboptimal now if you do repetitive motions in a suboptimal way like you do a lot of bench press or rows or overhead presses or whatever and the joint is not moving in an optimal way it's just going to start to cause problems and even before it causes problems your body actually limits the amount of strength it will build because your body actually has these kind of safety mechanisms in place where in fact studies show that like high level Olympic weight lifters are able to generate more force within their muscles than people who don't practice you get stronger it's a performance enhancement and I've actually tried to go more in that direction when I talk about posture and mobility because of you know a lot of the athletes that I've talked to and discussed and you know a lot of this like prerequisite stuff is just not attractive it's not like the flashy movements the explosive type movements but it actually is way more of contributing towards their performance long term if they really apply these concepts then you know these explosive strength moves that they could you know in their training program well speaking to performance the other thing I know when you talk about posture a lot of times right away I think people think old and joint pain and issues but you know I love that you go the performance direction because the other client that I used to love to help is my female client who comes in and does squats does deadlifts does all these movements they're supposed to do to build their butt and they can't build their butt and it's because their posture is out on you have they had a lot of times they have this excessive anterior pelvic tilt so they're carrying their weight on their quads and their hip flexors the hip flexors are shortened and tight so when they go down into a squatted position they their chest falls forward more than normal because I'll tight their hip flexors are their quad dominant they're used to using the quads when they walk around and move all time and not the glutes as much as they should so then those muscles because they've trained them that way because of their posture takes over a movement that we think is for the glute we tell everybody to squat and deadlift because it's a great glute exercise but it's not if you have poor posture down there if you if you have this excessive anterior pelvic tilt and you've trained the body to be quad dominant when you go to do exercises that are supposed to be for the butt many times you won't feel it there for this exact reason and that's what unlocks this is teaching that client that here's your postural deviation that you have going on these are the exercises that we need to work on to address it if we do a good job doing that then when you go over and you do the squatting and the deadlifting those movements now you'll start to see your butts firing better yeah absolutely it allows you to connect to your muscles more effectively again it makes your exercises much more effective how big of a deal is this it's a big deal okay a barbell squat for example one of the most effective exercises you can do for the lower body generally speaking that can range from it's gonna hurt you to it's going to make you mobile strong build great muscle burn body fat that's the range now you can be somewhere in the middle you could be getting some of the benefits of the squat but really not all of it because your movement patterns aren't very good because your posture is bad but why not make all your exercises much more effective and this is again this is a huge deal it's like you're gonna get twice as good of results and feel twice as good just by focusing on correcting some of this you know posture issues I mean keep in mind your posture is what you're dealing with every single day it's it's unconscious right you're standing you're sitting you're talking to people your posture is how you hold yourself you form into your patterns you do and so this is it's a very important thing to look at to assess and then kind of read the clues and then go from there and you know strengthen what's weak right so again I'll give you a simple example right so we talked about forward shoulder very common I like talking about that one because it's easy to envision so if you're listening or watching this podcast you could easily picture somebody with shoulders that round forward usually this means that the person needs to strengthen the muscles that pull the shoulders back and maybe even drop the shoulders right so rhomboids mid trapezius those are some of the muscles we want to work on so now if somebody goes and does a row theoretically they should be able to work those muscles but what if somebody goes and does a row but doesn't know how to activate those muscles properly or just goes and does the row and in their lat dominant or whatever what's it going to do can actually make the posture worse so this is why it's important to see this kind of stuff pay attention to form a technique do the exercise in a way that benefits you specifically because exercises can be done wrong and they can be done properly you can get great benefit from them or you can actually hurt yourself again posture is one piece of the puzzle but it's a great one and it's one that you can do with and look at for most people well so let's I mean what would you do as far as first steps you have somebody who's listening right now okay the message received I've never really done an assessment on my posture I've never looked into this I've just been kind of working out yes I probably have some pain yes I probably have some stuff but where do I start well before we get into that I do want to give them take people like step by step here's what you can do but before I do I want to address one thing because I get a lot of messages on this do you guys get messages on like posture correcting devices oh yeah you're just like they're like the reverse bra like they wear on the shoulders but pulls it back or or it's like a little electric stim that that's on in between the shoulder blades just to kind of like like let you know that your shoulder blades are a little too far that reminds people or whatever just to pull back yes a lot of divide or there's like the lumbar support in your chair oh if I use this I'll sit up you know tall or whatever two things one good posture is unconscious unless you feel like thinking about your posture all day long which I don't think anybody it'd be like thinking about blinking in fact I just said that right now I'm breathing right now yeah it's it's it's it you it won't work that way so good posture has to be natural it can't be something that you have to think about all the time it just won't work the other thing to keep in mind with posture correcting devices is if something is holding you in place then you are not holding in place right right so if I have something so it might give you temporary relief on pain but it's not addressing the root cause not only that but I'll get weaker right if I have something holding my shoulders back for me placing forcing me in proper posture all the muscles that are supposed to do that they're going to turn off taking a break even more and I'm an atrophy even more I mean if you've ever had a cast this is an extreme example but if you've ever had a cast on your arm or leg and you take it off in two or three weeks you see that muscle loss well to a smaller degree this is what you're doing when you're wearing things that put you in the position you want to be in all the muscles that are supposed to do that now they get even more turned off and you cause even more problems so those posture correcting devices in the short term might make you feel better in the long term are terrible I never recommend these to anybody so I just wanted to address that because I get messages from people I put this on yeah feels great and I'm like don't wear it for don't wear it anymore because it's going to make things waste of money absolutely all right so let's go step by step now normally you know posture assessment is literally you look at yourself standing from the front from the side from the back your barefoot here's a problem with it there's a lot of things to look at and in fact we ran into this problem years ago when we just when we designed one of our programs maps prime it was like do we put this kind of assessment in there and we thought well it's gonna be tough because the average person really isn't quite sure how to read these types of things it'd be better if we put tests together for people to follow so here's what we did this is your first step go to maps prime webinar dot com it's totally free and what you're going to see Justin so Justin's in there and he's taking Doug our producer through three tests that will tell you quite a bit about your you know imbalances deviations your how your body moves the three tests are there's a wall test so we're standing up against the wall there's different points of contact and you're actually sliding your hands up in the up the wall and down the wall it'll tell you a lot about your upper back your shoulders your neck even tells you a little bit about your lower back so you do that test then there's a windmill test which tells you more about your spine your lumbar spine how you hip hinge so stuff that has to do with your hips can you rotate can you twist then there's a squat assessment that you do and what you do is when you go on the reason why I want you to go to maps prime webinar dot com is because you need to watch Justin and listen to him tell you what to look out for because he's literally going to coach you through your own self assessment so once you do this and it's great it's invaluable this is interactive so make sure that yeah you you can pause it you know do whatever you got to do but try your best to perform this with Doug right and then what you'll find is out of these three tests one of them is going to be worse than the others you might suck at all three of them a lot of people do but one of them is going to be like I can't even get my body to move that way or it looks way different than what you explained take that worst test and then practice it every single day by practicing it every single day you're going to work on the areas you need to work on to correct some of your posture issues and to correct some of your movement issues and keep in mind that the test is actually an exercise too that's what I mean yeah so like you know you might think oh then what am I supposed to do to fix this it's a you're doing it by practicing the test and you'll see when you go through the webinar with Justin he teaches you the intent of the movement so and I can't stress that enough how important that piece to all this is like if you just go and this is my my biggest pet peeve with seeing people do stretches like when you do exercises and you and you stretch to where it's comfortable to you and then you just kind of let go of the stretch and go back you're not really correcting or fixing anything you're doing what's comfortable the body when you can't do a movement and you can't perform it correctly there's going to be an uncomfortable piece to this and that's the the intent of the movement by trying to get a greater range of motion and Justin talks you through that through that webinar so if you do this correctly these three little exercises won't feel so little you know a lot of times if you're doing this really well you do a few sets of each one of these movements you should actually start getting sweat running down your face from it because it should be intense like that it's a workout and you're trying to activate muscles you're not just trying to like what Adam said stretching stretching does increase passive yes it increases range of motion but it isn't connect you to that new range of motion what you need is ranges of motion that you can connect to that you control so when you're doing these movements you're practicing them you're practicing them like you would an exercise you're connecting you're putting yourself in position your your muscles are turned on there's nothing passive about this and it is a little bit of a workout so pick the one that you sucked the most at and you'll know it'll be quite obvious that one you should practice at least once every single day for about 10 minutes okay just practice 10 minutes every single day if you practice it twice a day even better now you might want to you might be asking why so frequent if you're trying to change a movement pattern frequency is king when you're trying to build muscle frequency is important but you need because of the intensity and volume that you're trying to build muscle you need to have days off in between for rest with this you're practicing often because you're trying to get the muscles to move and connect the way that you want it's a new pattern keep that in mind so to give you another example think of the way you walk you don't even think about actually just walk very natural about the new way of walking quite a bit but once you practice it enough it might become your new default pattern it will become something that's quite natural that's what we're trying to do with these tests so that's why you pick the worst one and you practice it every single day now the one that was not a sucky is that worst one but still your second I'd say second worst practice this one every other day so you have the one that you do every day now you've got the one that you practice every other day and then the third test so there's your routine right there that should help you work on your individual problems and movement issues and then step number three yeah you got to talk about how we design what we call fortification sessions which we we built those into maps prime and they are designed to compliment these tests right so step three would be to modify your workout to compliment your particular posture issues so to just to stick to the example of forward shoulder if the shoulders are rolling forward you're going to want to practice exercises that pull the shoulders back right so like a cable row a band row you know a barbell row dumbbell row but really focus on the part that you need to focus on which is the pulling the shoulders back part this means you're going to have to go lighter slow down and focus on the squeeze you can't if you're trying to correct something and you go heavy not going to happen because the second you go heavy that's when your body is going to revert back to what it always does what it does best which is moving away that you want to change correct it also means to you should do those movements before you do the ones that could potentially make that that issue worse and will stick with the forward shoulder example so when I ever had a client that had excessive forward shoulder which was most I would never start their their workout with a bench press I would always go do either priming movements before the workout or at least do things like seated row or work the back muscles before I go do an exercise that's going to train all the muscles that are already tight in that person so when you start to get that understanding of what muscles are tight in your body which ones are under active or weak start with the weaker muscles in your workout and and strengthen those wake those up get above get a good pump in those before you go to any exercises that may potentially make that issue worse right so this means you can take some exercises out of your workout this means you can leave them at the end of the workout so that you're focusing on things you don't need to focus on but essentially what you're doing is you're taking your you're doing those other movements every single day right the 10 minutes a day or whatever but then when you get to your regular workout you're still not taking your focus off this you're just doing your workout but now pointing a lot of the exercises in the direction of correcting your posture to use it the other one of the other deviations in anterior pelvic tilt this where the person's you know low back like the instagram model pose or whatever you would do like a reverse crunch or you would do a plank where you where you tuck the tailbone you do the opposite of anterior pelvic tilt just to strengthen the opposite side of that right to correct the posture essentially what you're doing is it's like you're moving too far in one direction you got to strengthen the opposite direction to get it to move in that direction and then you start to achieve you know some balance if you do this you should see your body progress you should feel progression almost right away you actually feel good right away you and you should if you're doing a good job of this instantly should you should see a difference if you weren't doing it before right if you weren't addressing posture you weren't doing these movements before and you added in now you should I recommend you test this so how would I test that with like forward shoulder well let's say someone's never really paid attention this up until this podcast episode and so before you decide to go do incline or flat bench tomorrow or the next day one of the next day you're going to do chest and you think that you might have a little bit of forward shoulders go do exactly what we said go do three four sets of seated row first before you go into your bench and tell me if you feel a difference when you go bench you should notice a difference if you're somebody who has that excessive arch in your low back the anterior pelvic tilt does stick in the butt out go do floor bridges for three sets before you do that or go do the active plank that Sal was talking about and then go do squats or deadlifts and tell me if you notice a difference if you've never done that and you've never applied this before you should already start to feel progress on the very first time with it will feel like is it'll feel like exercises that usually took you longer a few sets to warm up or that feel kind of like sticking points all of a sudden feel a lot better some cases you actually are stronger yes yeah in some cases I've actually had some male clients who wanted to increase their bench press and all we did was prime their upper back properly and then I had him bench press and they added a rep you know like a rep or two to their max I mean I noticed that for myself that was the first thing I noticed with was and here's why when you bench press the stability yeah and when you bench press if you have excessive forward shoulder like so many people do the shoulder and the arms the triceps take over the movement and the chest is a much bigger stronger muscle so that's a lot of times why they fatigue out they fatigue out because the arms and shoulders fatigue out they weren't even getting a lot of the chest in the movement by priming the upper back really well and then going in it the chest is taking the load like it's supposed to it's a bigger stronger muscle all the sudden they get another rep out or can add five or ten pounds exactly so when you practice this you should notice almost immediately you feel better and maybe even get stronger after a couple weeks of doing this you should also notice that you're getting stronger it becomes much more common so just to recap the steps that you can do first go to mapsprimewebinar.com and then follow along and take the test Justin literally coaches you through in the video again it's totally free then pick the test that you did the worst at and practice that one every single day for ten minutes or so every day the one that you did second worst at practice that one every other day and then the test that you did the best at that's the one that you practice twice a week the third step modify your workouts to compliment your posture and those exercises that you do to correct your posture in your workouts you got to go light and you got to slow down and you got to focus on the squeeze I can't stress this enough if you add if you have forward shoulder for example stick to that one right you have forward shoulder and you're doing heavy rows I guarantee you your shoulders are going to remain forward with those heavy rows you're going to do the exercise in the way that you do it best which is the way that you've always done it with your forward shoulder so you got to go light you got to slow down and you got to really really squeeze look if you want more free information from Mind Pump we have a lot of guides you can check out go to mindpumpfree.com you can also find all of us individually on social media we're all on Instagram you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin you can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam wrong you can look at you can speculate on what's going to happen in the future and how it's going to suck no no no don't do that just literally take the energy it's just energy and and just shift it about three feet over here and start looking at how you can make this work for you it's just