The arched back: 10 exercises to improve your posture.
Poor posture is usually characterized by a hunched back and overly-engaged front shoulders.
Whether for cosmetic purposes or to eliminate back and / or neck pain, it can be beneficial to straighten your back and improve your posture through specific exercises.
How to correct bad posture?
Do you have back, upper back and neck pain?
Men, women, sedentary people, sportsmen… a large part of the population suffers from poor posture.
The main cause: bad daily habits as well as many factors: sitting position, old age, muscle imbalance, muscle wasting, etc.
To correct your posture, you no longer need to equip yourself with a back straightener! This type of equipment will actually improve the placement of your back and shoulders, but it will not treat the disease at the source.
To sustainably straighten your back and shoulders, you will need to adopt better postures every day, striving to keep your back straight and your bust "out", but also regularly practice specific strengthening and stretching exercises.
You will understand, to stand more straight, the goal is to try to straighten the shoulders back.
So, don't forget to bring your shoulder blades together, while having your shoulders down and relaxed to reduce tension.
This is valid as well in your daily life (walking, working behind your desk), as during your sports practice.
At the muscular level, the main objective is to strengthen the rhomboid muscles. Acting as a scapula fixer, they help straighten the back and lower the shoulders.
To learn more about these muscles, we recommend that you read our article on rhomboid muscles.
In particular, you will learn that rowing or swimming are great sports for improving posture. This postural rebalancing takes time, but a straightened back will allow you to feel better (decrease in muscle tension) and look better!
Our 10 exercises to straighten your back
These exercises help straighten your back and shoulders to improve your posture.
They focus on strengthening the muscles of the upper back (including the rhomboids) and the back of the shoulders (posterior deltoid) but also on an "opening" of the rib cage and a stretching of the anterior pectoral and deltoid muscles (before of the shoulders). Performed regularly, they will help you stand straighter.
You can repeat them ten times each, always taking the time to maintain the muscle contraction for a few seconds, for more efficiency.
Depending on the time available, you can chain several exercises in the form of circuit training, or repeat the same exercise several times.