Posture corrector brace. Will it "fix" your posture?

The posture brace corrector is another gadget we have here in the United States because we love gadgets that straps over your shoulders and pulls your shoulders back, claiming that that's going to correct your posture. Is that true? Is it going to work? Is it a waste of your time? I'm going to go over all these reasons and some more in this video. I'm Akin. So I'm here for Soul Core Fitness. I'm the owner and I've been in this field for about 3:30 years. I'm a summer therapist and summer trainer, which is under the osteopathic model, kind of like a physical therapist, but more. And I've seen a lot of really crazy things out there in terms of YouTube and magazines about what to do for fitness. And I want to impart my holistic knowledge into this platform so people can see that there's a much more effective way to work with the body. The body is built holistic. So if you work with holistic, it responds perfectly. You can follow me on any of these social media accounts. You can meet with me personally. You can see that I not only own a health and fitness business, I also live the life. If you like what I'm putting out and you want to hear more about this holistic method of training and treating your body, then subscribe to our channel where I put out new videos about once a week and you can interact with the videos. Let me know what you want to see. I'm more than willing to put up videos on topics that you're interested in. The posture brace corrector is a gadget, a tool that they designed. I don't know how much it costs because I don't have one, but I don't think it's very much to correct your posture. Now, there's a lot of different forms of posture, one being good and a bunch being bad. The one they try and correct is what we call in the industry forward head posture kyphosis. So it's a pathology. So forehead postures, like it sounds, my head is too far forward in front of my shoulders. And then kyphosis is my back is rounded too much. Right. It's stuck in this. So it's kind of a combination of both. These are problematic. It's not a good position to be your head. If it's too far forward, you have a law, it's called a law of 22 degrees. So we have a straight line here. Once your head hits 20 degrees, and I have no idea if that's 20 degrees because I'm the model, you can't come back because when you bring your head forward, your neck flexes forward but your spine also slides forward. So it flexes and slides and eventually you get to a point where like you can't come back. That's why you see the old people in the walkers with their head down. That's it, they're done. That's not good. Kyphosis is an over rounding of the back. So my back should be rounded at a normal amount. It's called kyphotic osis is a pathology where it's too much. This is also bad. As you can see, kyphosis 1 leads to forward head posture because as I round my back and this is locked, my shoulders naturally go forward. As my souls are not to go forward, my head slides forward because the table that my head is on is tilted. So it ruins my head posture, but it also ruins my shoulder, which ruins my viscera. You know what you got here, you got lungs, you got your heart, you had a metasteum. You have a bunch of nerves that go through there. So if I reduce the space in there, obviously your heart and lungs need space to move. They need to be in a certain position. Well, that's problematic. A lot of this posture comes a lot of, excuse me, bad posture comes from bad posture. So it comes from bad training, it comes from bad mechanics of your body. A lot of it comes from desk posture. I've got a video at the end that I'll show you about sitting too long in mid back pain and it's one of my earlier ones. So I actually have an exercise in there which I don't do anymore, but it talks about this posture and what to do about it. Now there's a lot of joints and muscles involved in this bad posture, so we're going to try and keep it simple. But if you look at your forehead, I mean you have five cergovertebrae with the joints between, let's say from your bottom of your neck to your mid back, you get a bunch more from T1 to let's say just T9. So we're going to go to just here, all those involved. Each one of those joints is involved in having this bad posture because each joint should work independently and have different information and things. It does. You also have musculature. So as I talked about, as you become kyphotic and as your shoulders move forward, the most important thing is your scapula, your shoulder blades move. So I'm standing facing this way. These are my shoulder blades, they move what's called protracted. They move out to the side. When they move out to the side, the shoulders go with it. Now, if the shoulders go with it now, your rhomboids are too flaccid and tight. Now your levator scapula, which goes from that area to your head, is too flaccid and weak. Now your pec minor, which goes from your crocobialis, which is a little bone right here, to your ribs, your pec major, latissimus dorsi, your anterior deltoid, your biceps, like your cochlear. There's a ton of stuff that become out of place. So if I want to correct my posture and my body works as an interdependent, interconnected being, then I need to think about each one of those joints, each one of those muscles, the ligaments associated with those muscles, the tendons associated with the muscles associated with the joints. So you can see kind of where I'm going here to just pull the shoulders back doesn't seem like it's correct, the whole posture, but that's exactly what these companies say. They say if you just take the shoulders and pull them back, everything's going to magically go back in place. That is not the case. Now, I've heard arguments about it reminds me to pull my shoulders back and stuff like that. Okay, I accept that. But as I mentioned before, there's a whole bunch of other things that need to happen. It's not just the shoulders back. It's more important. The shoulder blades back, the scapula. It's the articulation, the movement of the thoracic spine to allow my shoulders to go back. It's the strength and articulation of the C spine, the neck, to go back and to be aware. It's the loosening of the tight, possibly weak muscles in the front of your body, your anterior muscles that need to be work. I don't see how one thing put on your shoulders, pulling back can do all those things. It can't. There's no way that. No way that happens. But like most things, they take one aspect of one thing you need to do, and they go, okay, if this one thing happens, everything else should fall in place. That's not how the body works. The body works as an interconnected, interdependent thing. That means it needs to work together, it needs to communicate. They need to be in a certain place. Everybody needs to do their job, communicate to each other that I'm doing their job to help everybody else doing their job. Having an external source on your body stops that from happening. Did you shell out somebody for a posture brace corrector? I generally want to know how it went for you. Did it work? Did it not work? Just let me know in the comments. If you really want to work on your posture, if that's a goal of yours, then it needs to be a multifaceted, holistic activity. First and foremost, you need to be aware of your posture. You need to be aware of what your body's doing, right? So whatever you need to do. So if you have a desk job, you need to make sure that you're looking at the top third of the screen, that you're sitting ergonomically, that you're not slumping over or sitting in a chair with your laptop. As you sit in your chairs or walk around in your life, you need to be aware of your posture, but that's not enough because you need to retrain your body to have posture. So exercise is there to educate. To educate means to tell the body what to do, because you shouldn't have to think about your posture all the time. It's good to be aware. But if you're constantly telling yourself to pull your shoulders back and to sit tall, that's going to last for, I don't know, a minute, because eventually it's going to get tired, you're going to forget you're doing something else, you're going to lose it. But if you tell the body what to do in different parts, which I'm going to talk about here in a second, then it just does it naturally. That's what you want. You want your body to just do its job. So before you work out, though, you want to be hydrated. Because if I don't hydrate my tissue, my soft tissue, if I exercise it, it makes things worse. So you start by hydration. You need to make sure you have plenty of sleep. Because if my cortisol level's all over the place and I'm stressed out and I'm not repairing myself at night, it doesn't matter what you do, you're going to be all jacked up. Once you do get to working out, then you need to go through each of these different areas to educate them, to strengthen them, to loosen them. So I want to do an exercise for each one of my joints of my spine. Each one should be a different one, not one for all. The best I found is Aldo is they're an exercise to open up, strengthen, wake up, make more aware. Each joint, now it's smarter, now it moves more I need to strengthen my rhomboids, both of them, major and minor. I need to strengthen though, with my arms in above the glen humel joint. Because biomechanics says that when I have it above, my shoulder blades move together, which allows my rhomboids to stay fixed and to work. I've seen a lot of videos where they have them down below. That doesn't work as well. Works your lats more. You need to strengthen your levator scapula because after, after I strengthen my rhomboids with the butterflies, my shoulder blades go back. Great. Now I strengthen my levator scapula to pull my head back in place. Now with that in place, now with my joints open in my spine. Now I've taught my body, but more importantly my brain, what I wanted to do. Because when you train, you want to develop what's called a new motor engram, right? So when you develop bad posture, you develop a motor engram, an idea in your brain of how your body should be. And I see this all the time in my studio. I'll have somebody set up for a posture and their head is off to the side. They think, that's straight. I'll move their head straight and go. That's where your head should be. And they're like, I'm going to fall off to the right. I'm like, no, you're not. Because that motor engram in the brain said, hey, this is straight. So you need to train your body to go, this is straight. This is what I was talking about before, that the body should just do its job once you have the pneumo anagram. I now have a better plumb line. Now my ear, shoulder, hip, knee and ankle line up. I now have what's called a better gravity line, which is an inverse 40 degree cone that goes around your body. Because now everything is doing its job. Everything's stacked in place where they're supposed to be. And now I can manage myself in this 4 degree cone because when I have bad posture, I'm outside that cone, which means all the musculature needs to work. So in general, for a gravity line, when I'm here, my body's not lazy, but it's working, not a lot. It's just kind of managing a little here, a little there, a little here to keep me in place, right? It uses less energy if I'm out with this bad posture. And now I'm a little outside of 4 degree cone and I'm more interior, which means forward. Now all these muscles here are trying to hold me up because I need to walk forward, because I need to see where I'm going, because I need to eat my food, I need to drink my water, because the idea of the body is like, I want to survive. If my head's too far down, I'm going to end up dying. But now you're making all these postural muscles, which should work a little here, a little there. You're making them work with a bigger action more than they should be doing, which causes more dysfunction. Now, there's a lot of other places you need to work too, because again, the body works holistically. It works as one. It's not just about those little areas I just talked about. You need to train your feet because information from your feet to your brain to tell you where you are in space. You need to train your costa vertebral and your sternocostal joints, your ribs, basically, because if my ribs are tight and compressed, it won't allow my thoracic cage to move. You need a myofascial stretch. I choose myofascial stretching because it works holistically with the body. The different muscles, the pec minor, the pec major, the latissimus dorsi, anterior deltoid, the biceps. Because again, I want to train my body where I have dysfunction, but also respect the connections in the rest of my body. So that for me is a good way to correct your posture. Now we go back to do I think the posture based corrector is good? I would say no. I would say no because even if it does remind you to pull your shoulders back, it's like a false hope. Like, oh, it's reminding me to pull my shoulders back, but it's not doing anything else. And the further you stay in dysfunction, the harder it is to get out of dysfunction. The longer you stay in this position, the more your body adapts to that position. Even if I remember to pull my shoulders back a little bit, the rest of my body is not being trained. And truthfully, my shoulders aren't being trained to pull back the way they should be pulled back via the scapula and rhomboids. So I'm making their dysfunction worse. So for me, I know people like these gadgets because you don't have to work. And I could pay 20 bucks, whatever it is, and I could put it on and all of a sudden magical fairies sprinkle fish dust on me and everything happens. But that's not the case with the body. You have this beautiful body. It's here to do these beautiful things. All it wants from you is to show a little love back, a little love to keep itself in balance. And it'll keep doing whatever you want in your life until you decide to lie down one day and die. So I'm. For me personally, I am not going to leave my life and the way my body is up to some gadget that does this much of what I totally need. Phew. I got a little more fired up about that one than I thought I would. It's just that I really believe in living this life to its fullest. And I don't like when people give, you know, they sell products purely to make a buck with partial information, false hope to people. I can't tell you how many people I've seen who come in after using these gadgets. Not just a posture brace, but that the psoas one and the fascia blaster and all these things, right? These people make good money. It doesn't help you at all. In fact, it takes you backwards. I really believe in training the body holistically. So if you like what I said, if you're more interested in finding out information around that, then I've got some options for you. So first and foremost I've got a free Facebook group. It's Soul Core Fitness. My business, strength, mobility and flexibility for active people. It's all about learning how to train your body holistically so it functions at its best so that your body can keep up with the life that you want to live. It's an interactive group, right? So people ask questions. I put out mini trainings like two minute videos on different topics I find interesting. I put out blog posts and stuff like that. And then I also do challenges which are three to five days interactive. I pick a topic, I go through information and we go through specific stretches, exercises relative to that topic. I also do masterclasses. So again I take a topic and I really go in depth about it. But it's interactive. People are asking questions. We're trying to go back and forth. So I can try to enlighten you more as to the way that I think you should work your body. If you're not into that, not into Facebook, no problem. I also have a free ebook. It's. What's it called? It's called get out of Pain, Get Mobile and get to life. You want to live four steps. You can download it with the description below and you get instant access or if you're ready to go, if you want to talk more about what this training is like, then schedule a call with me. Use in the description below the link to schedule a time with me. We'll go over what you're doing, what your sticking points are, where you want to go, and if I see you're a good fit, I'll mention how you can work with me. But if not, no matter what, I'm going to give you valuable information as to what I view, you view and a way forward for you. So I hope you found this information beneficial. Please, please give it a like if you liked it, it helps the algorithm. Tell other people who might benefit to see it, and don't forget to subscribe and share it with your friends. Thanks so much for watching. I really appreciate it.