 Did you know that poorer posture not only can damage your spine but can be depressing your mood and impairing your health? I'm Christine Linders and this is Movement Matters in our second episode of Posture Month. If you want to learn tips and techniques from a physical therapist who is a board certified specialist in orthopedics, this is a show for you. Good posture helps to improve your mood, increase your motivation and energy, prevent injury, and decrease pain. Today, you'll be learning how to change your posture in order to decrease risk of injury to your neck, back, and shoulder to feel more confident and to prevent suffering from other complications of poor posture, such as reflux. I'm happy to have Jane McWilliams, a former patient, on the show to talk about this very important topic. Aloha, Jane, and thank you so much for joining me on Movement Matters. Hi, Christine. You're so welcome. I'm happy to help. You helped me so much. It's great to have you. And so, Jane, as you know, we are talking about posture. Do you happen to be sitting right now? I am. Are you sitting up straight? I am. Excellent. Okay, so tell me. It's one of the most conscious things that I do in my daily routine. I have to think about how I'm standing and how I'm sitting. And when I first started doing it, it was quite exhausting. But it, like anything else, it becomes habit. So I love to hear that. The habit is so important for us to develop. And for those watching, if you're sitting or standing, pay attention to that. And for those of you who are sitting, is this you? Let's look at image one. This is a common picture. It's a funny picture. He's sitting at a kid's desk, but it shows the point of how you're hanging your head forward while you're on a laptop. If we go to image number two, this is what happens to your neck as you look down prolonged. In the image on the left, you'll see it's a very straight line. And in the image on the right, you'll see that nice sloping curve. That nice sloping curve is the natural curve of our neck. The straight one is what happens when you look down prolonged. So if we go to image number three, you only have one spine, so we want to treat it right. This shows an image of what happens if you do slump like that gentleman at the kids desk looking over his laptop, or like we all do or see others doing so much throughout our day on devices, sitting on the couch, slouch watching TV, doing some knitting, reading a book. So what can happen when you look down prolonged as well is image number four. And that shows what happens at the neck region. It's called a dowager's hump. They used to talk about it in the past as a widower's hump where the upper part of the cervical spine would compress usually due to osteoporosis. But nowadays with devices over the past couple decades, we're actually getting, you know, what I would call that millennial era version of the dowager's hump where you're looking down so much that the spine at the top of your neck actually curves forward a little bit more. So what do you do to save your own neck? Let's look at image number five. You adjust your desk, your chair or mouse. You can get a standing desk and you improve your postural awareness. There's devices that the first one that I knew about was Lumo Lift about eight years ago. And now they have upright posture devices that you can get that may be better for certain bodies or certain occupations during the day. But one of the keys with posture two is to take sitting breaks. Our skeleton wasn't designed to sit. Our bodies weren't designed to sit. They were designed to move. And one of the things, if you do have to sit for your job that I want to show you the viewers today is image number six, a simple technique that you can do to exercise the back of your body. And I'm showing using a band in the front here. But the point is to squeeze your shoulder blades, keep your elbows in at your side and rotate your hands outward. You could do it three times. You could do it five times. You could do it 10 times. What you want to make sure you do it at least every hour a couple times, especially if you catch yourself slouching. Another one of my favorites is image number seven. And I call that the W because you look like a W or the stick them up because that's what we would do if we were surrendering. And you just raise your hands, point your thumbs back, lift your chest and squeeze your shoulder blades. You can oscillate there for a few beats. You can hold it there and you could just do five or 10 reps. But that tends to undo that slouching forward posture or the looking down that we have to do sometimes during our day. I know I have to do it sometimes during my day when I'm working with a patient and I'm standing up working on them. So we just talked about a couple of quick things that you can do to improve your posture and save your neck. Now, Jane, what other ways can are out there that our posture can affect or to improve our posture? Well, I think for me, it's a mind body thing. And I do a lot of exercise like I swim and I do Pilates. And you have to keep in motion because if you're not at least walking or exercising, everything seems to tighten up. So yeah. And I find that the more active I am, the happier I am. And I mean, that pretty much says it all. I have a stand up desk and I don't stand all the time. And I'm 67 years old and I love work, so I'm certainly not ready for retirement. And it has saved my life because, like you said, we're not meant to sit down. That's so true. There was a talk I did that reminds me, the standing desk reminds me, and that we're not meant to sit down. I did a talk in New York City in I think 2014. And we were trying to keep the employees healthy and happy in their life with their families and their sports because they sit all day. And I cited some research that stated that there's not enough exercise at the end of your day if you sit all day for eight to 10 hours without getting up to undo the damage that you've done to your body, to your internal organs, to your cells. And that's where that you getting up on your standing desk, you moving around, research studies coming out and telling people get up every 20 minutes, even if you get up for 20 minutes, every 20 minutes, or 30 seconds and do some marching or stretch your arms up over your head or do the W or do the other exercise, your internal organs and your body and your cells need to move as well. And they're better off moved throughout the day than having in a rigorous workout at the end of the day. And standing desks, like you mentioned, are the perfect avenue to be able to accomplish that. What's interesting though is I made a conscious decision not to use my printer on my desk, but to use the printer that the office uses. So I have to go over and walk to get my copies of what I need. And it's made a big difference because you can't just stand there. I mean, you know, I would say I spend, yeah, I would I would say I spend, you know, more than half of my day looking at my emails. So just standing there, you've got to keep moving. That's that's great. So I know that we're going to be learning other things about our posture besides helping your internal organs, helping your spine. I know that when you're in pain or you're bummed out, people tend to just be sitting a little bit more slumped and maybe feeling a little unmotivated or tired. And I went to a seminar years ago, it might have actually been in 2010. I believe it was Tony Robbins. And I use that sometimes with my patients because everybody's there to learn something. They want to get something in their life or they want to change something in their life or they just want to have a better life in general. They already have an awesome life. They want to make it better. And he said, okay, slouch and frown and see how that makes you feel. And we all said, all right, everybody in the 10,000 people slouched and frowned, hung their head down and see how they fell. And then he goes, okay, now stand up. I think he actually told us to jump around, but stand up and smile and just hold that smile, sit up tall or stand up tall. We were standing, he had to jump around and laugh. And let me tell you, I could not have been in a bad mood if I tried because when I was sitting up straight, but I know I went there excited. And when I slouched and hung my head down, I did kind of start to feel a little, I don't know, ho hum. So posture as an avenue to improve your mood because we can take control of that. We can squeeze our shoulder blades and sit up straight when we're blue or when we're down or when we're tired and actually improve our mood. Have you experienced that? I absolutely have. As a matter of fact, it's the reason that I came to see you because I went to my doctor and I said, I just don't feel right. I don't stand up right. I'm off balance. I need some help. And he referred me directly to you, Christine, because he remembers having worked with you, I think in New York City, right? When you were at special surgery. He did. He did. And I went there. I had to, you know, wait a while and I actually went to my first appointment and I felt so much better because number one, somebody was going to help me and I knew it was going to work because I was dedicated to making it work. So you reach out to the person, not just from the physiological standpoint, but also of where their mindset is and what they're doing and how they're reacting in their life. Because to me, it's all kind of one big entity that when you don't feel good, you don't look good, you don't present yourself well, you don't look happy. You're not energetic. And once I started in my physical therapy, I actually, one, lost weight. Two, I was much happier. I realized that there was an answer for me and I didn't have to live in pain. I had better interaction with people at work, right? I found that I had more vitality. I mean, I had more open ideas and I still stand with that now because I'm continuing. I mean, how long has it been since I've seen you, probably two years? I think so. And it's like a day-to-day change. It's changed my attitude, you know? It's almost like an attitude of gratitude, to be honest. And that I know because of what I've done, I'm going to have improved physical health and longevity over my lifetime. I think that's awesome. And it's inspiring for anyone that's watching to know that you can come from not feeling good, having this pain, being unsure about how it's going to affect your life because you don't want to live in pain, to having that hope and that feeling of, you know what, there's an answer for me. I'm going to work on my posture. It's going to help my body, my mood, longevity, vitality. Those are great things to link in to your posture and holding yourself up, right? And there was a study that I read years ago, I mean, probably 15 years ago, where they talked about collagen and, you know, collagen is constantly laying down in our body and it slows down. And that's why we get wrinkles and all those other things in addition to other reasons. But if collagen is constantly turning over in our body to form our tissues and you're sitting slouched, the collagen is laying down in the altered position. And that's where you'll see when people do age and get into the 70s and 80s. And they have that hunch that I showed in the picture earlier, because now the collagen has been turning over and the body is getting older and things are getting stiffer, but they've been held in the wrong position for a long period of time. So what else can we do to improve our posture or tips that we can do to form that habit that you formed, Jane? So we're gonna have to go to a break, but when we get back, we're gonna talk about that. This is Think Tech Hawaii movement matters. I'm speaking with Jane McWilliams about the many ways that posture can improve your life. We'll be right back. Stay tuned. Aloha, y'all. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I'm the host of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen, close to my heart, electric buses and electric vehicles. So please dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines. I have a TV show based on my book, which is also called Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and building winning teams. We are having a fun drive for Think Tech Hawaii and please, please, please, please help us keep these shows going. Please go on our website ThinkTechHawaii.com to donate. Thank you. Hi, I'm Christy Linders. We're back. This is Movement Matters on Think Tech Hawaii and we are talking to Jane McWilliams about the various ways that posture can improve your health, your mood and your body. So before the break, Jane and I were talking about posture and the different ways when you improve your posture it can improve your vitality, your energy, your feelings of motivation. But one of the other things that improve posture can help you with as we go through life and especially as we age is preventing other sorts of digestive issues including reflux that occurs when you are slouched as we age. There's less space for your intestines and your internal organs. So it makes you more susceptible to have the stomach contents coming up to your diaphragm, creating that really discomfort and uncomfortable sensation of reflux. And I know with my patients as I've watched them age or they've come to me when they were older they tend to sleep with at least two big pillows at night and that's because their posture has been formed that way. Now I always tell them, listen, it's not too late. If you start working on your posture, start squeezing your shoulder blades, standing against a wall, rotating your arms out, doing the stick them up for the W, you start improving the muscles that hold your posture up that you haven't used while you've been slouching for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. So it's not too late for you to change your posture and it's one of the things that we can do right now. We have absolute control over our body so we can squeeze our shoulder blades or make that decision that Jane, you said you made the decision that you were going to follow through and take care of your body because you wanted to not live in pain and we need to make a decision that hey, if we're blue or we're not feeling well, we know it's not good for our body and we want to feel better in our body. So squeeze your shoulder blades, sit up straight, smile until your mood improves if you're having a down day. Now Jane, I also wanted to know like I fly 13 hours to the East Coast to visit my family every three months and see patients that I'm lucky to see and friends and so I'm on an airplane and I have some tricks to prevent my neck and back from hurting from sitting in airplane seats which are not ergonomically designed. Do you have any strategies that you use? I do because sitting in the movie theater or sitting in an airplane for any length of time really can exacerbate anything that is going on in my back. It's the lack of motion. So a couple of things. One is I never go on a trip without one of those neck things that you get for $20 in the airport because I don't put it on my neck to go to sleep. I put it behind my back and it helps me sit very straight. The other thing is that I get up a lot and I try to sit on the aisle seat so I don't have to bother people and I just started this and that is I have the bands you know the elastic the big bands that you would use in the in the weight room or in the training room and they're you know strips of many colors and you actually gave me one Christine and I have one at my desk and I leave one in my pocketbook because it's very light and it doesn't weigh anything when you're traveling around but I use it to do what you're saying which I'm a swimmer so I don't want my shoulders to lock so I do stretching exercises that way and you know pulling and just being active it's you know it's a mental thing because if you're on a six-hour flight going somewhere it can be really debilitating by the time you get off the airplane you want to go into your yoga poses you know right in the airplane to get your back back into shape I know I that's that's a great point and that does remind me too of the keep the band at your desk I tell a lot of people or put it at home I know you don't want to have clutter in our house but put it somewhere where you see it because it can be a reminder oh there's the band let me do my exercises oh no I caught myself slouching I haven't read my tv yeah that's great I wish I could see you that's perfect because you're relaxing watching tv into your couch and so you could do those exercises to form better posture and feel better and also we're talking about the airplane and the neck pillow it reminded me another consequence of having poor posture can be headaches and cervical migraines because when the head is forward the muscles in the base of your neck right below your skull they are very short muscles they're tiny and they run this way and they run this way and when your head is forward because you're slouching and you have to look up to see like a computer screen or the tv those muscles become short over time and the big arteries and nerves pass up through them and people will come in to see me after a plane flight where their head was kind of kinked back where they were sleeping because they didn't have it supported or after you know working accountants have it after tax season and they will say oh my gosh I never had a history of migraines and this is the most insane pain I've ever felt I just can't I can't do it and it's it's because of the neck because of the position of their posture that they're not realizing that they're doing while they're at work at play tending to a new a baby it could be anytime but you mentioned the movie and movies are a great place to bring something to support your back because of the seating I know I always do I'm like you I bring a fleece or a sweater to cover me if it's too cold and when to roll up to put it in my back so that I'm comfortable so I'm not harming myself while I'm enjoying myself I think that's that's a key point so what other tips how is your back doing well can I my back is good but I'm interested in hearing what you have to say about sleeping positions and pillows because there are so many you know drink pillow or this and that and I'm thinking something maybe the way I'm sleeping is creating me to slouch or something you know shoulder wise or something so can you shed a little light on that for me yes that's that's actually a great question I wish I took a picture of that that's a great a great thing to talk about so I mentioned how when you age people are using two or three pillows and I'm trying to get them off of those because now you're having your head pushed forward while you're sleeping and that's a restorative position so I sit up straight I had a car accident very bad car accident when I was 1718 19 and so my neck always hurt when I wasn't straight so I have formed that habit even though yeah I would love to do this I do it for a couple seconds here and there and then I'm back upright because I know it's the best thing for me and my neck feels the best but I was sleeping on a very flat pillow or a feather pillow that I could kind of tuck in the crook of my neck where there a backward curve that I showed in that picture but it wouldn't push my head forward so it filled the space of my neck while my head was resting on the very flat part and I also squished it up like next to my neck so that my head wouldn't turn while I was sleeping now that's me I have good posture but what if you have bad posture and now you want to fix it I tell people it's very important to make sure that when you're laying on your back your pillows are not too high or too low so that your head is kicked back like this you want to make sure that you support the head so that your face can be level like this and oftentimes people need to put the pillow under their head and maybe like a rolled shirt or something in that round of their neck but don't put it behind your upper back because that's when it tends to kick you forward you want it under your head and neck not under your shoulders so I think where you put the pillow to even if you are very forward right now and you're older and you need to have a bigger pillow because you don't want to be kicked back like this on a small pillow you want to have your head here supported do not put it under your shoulders like the pillow needs to stop here so that your back can be on the bed and that your whole neck and head are supported does that does that make sense yes it does this makes a lot of sense and sleep sleeping on your back not on your side or or that was for back sleepers yeah that was going to clarify so that's the position for back sleepers now when you're on a side sleeper it's a little easier for me to show because I have wide shoulders so using a flat pillow if I'm a slide seeper isn't going to help for me because my head is going to have to go like that to meet the pillow and my shoulders are pretty broad if I was shoulders in here I could probably use it but you want to make sure that when you lay on your side that that's not the position of your head especially if you're having neck pain then it's more this is funny with the camera and it's more straight like this so the pillow is here to support your head and not here where your head has to meet the pillow because that's when people sometimes can wake up and say I don't know how do I kink to my neck and I'll always ask them did you did you roll off the pillow do you have a new pillow where you're trying something different or did you just sleep wrong but the net can get kinked very easily if you have to meet the pillow so on your side you will want a larger pillow depending on the firmness of your bed I use a firm bed so I would need a larger pillow and I do actually have three pillows in my bed one's really flat and fluffy that I could squish in how I go to sleep but I'll roll over on my side I'm consciously now I'm sleeping unconsciously I grab the big pillow and I put it under my head so that I'm not kinked so that I'm here what do you do do you sleep on your back do you sleep on my back and that's not always in the case I used to be a side sleeper but now I sleep on my back and I'm very comfortable I think that's great up a couple of times at night and I'm go right back to sleep which is awesome so we have a couple of minutes left Jane and I wanted you or us to reiterate a little bit more about posture and how important it is for many things just besides your neck and back pain or shoulder pain but to mood and how you feel in your life and your relationships can you give us a little summary you said it so well earlier I just think that when you're standing up you feel it straight and balanced that's a key thing so if you're not strong and balanced you need to figure out how you're going to do that especially as you age because I'm 67 and I find that one of the best things I've ever done is start pilates and I do some yoga and I swim and it's all kind of a cross training thing because you can you know have too much of one thing and and that's not good for you as well and I know I also walk because I'm a golfer so but I find that just the attitude alone of the shoulders back the head the neck especially when I'm at work gives me just a better focus on what I'm doing and I have better at interaction even when I'm on the phone I'm more accepting I'm more open because when you're in pain you know you because you begin to shut down at least I do I don't know and it's true the type of job that I have I can't be shut down I have to listen to other people's ideas and be positive so well that's well that's wonderful so I was so grateful to have you on the show Jane thank you so much for shedding all your inspiration with me and the viewers we're gonna wrap it up but what I want to say is please stay tuned in February we'll be talking about sports injuries and sports injury prevention in February thank you so much for joining us today on think tech hawaii.com and remember life is better when you listen to your physical therapist