“If you keep making that face it’ll stay that way.”

Maybe Mom was more correct than she knew.

From a health standpoint, I think posture may be the most ignored component of them all (okay, maybe diet ranks up there too).

Poor posture limits your ability to breathe (not like that’s important, right?), promotes overuse injuries, creates muscle imbalances, and results in back pain just to name a few.

Without an ongoing awareness of your posture on a daily basis, you can expect it progressively adapt to whatever shape you spend most of your time in. For instance, if you sit all day at a computer, you can expect to be shaped like the chair you sit in with a rounded back, rounded shoulders, and a forward head position.

Pretty, huh?

The processes that cause this progressive and undesirable adaptation in our posture are called stress-relaxation and creep.

Stress-relaxation is a progressive decline in the natural tension that tissues produce when placed under tension. When the tissues are held under constant tension for a long enough time, they begin to deform and elongate. This called creep. This becomes a relatively permanent elongation unless the tension is removed from the tissues before creep occurs.

You see gravity works.

It pulls down on you all day and as you relax your muscles and the tissues are exposed to that pull of gravity, stress-relaxation and creep will occur within about 10-20 minutes if you don’t change position.

Your strategy to overcome this is the 15 Minute Rule.

Every 15 minutes to need to make an active postural correction and even better, change positions entirely. For instance, if you’ve been sitting, stand. If you’ve been slouching, sit as tall as possible. You may also want to perform some corrective stretching for about 15 seconds on key muscle groups that are prone to shortening.

Most common are the muscles that internally rotate the shoulders (pecs, lats, subscapularis), downwardly rotate your shoulder blades (levator scapulae, rhomboids), and flex the knee and the hip (TFL, psoas, iliacus, rectus femoris, and hamstrings).

The 15 Minute Rule is so important that when we designed our upper body performance training video Inside-Out we felt it imperative to include daily postural correction strategies that lead to upper extremity injuries and declines in performance.

So I guess Mom WAS right in a sense…and, uh, eat your vegetables.

Later

P.S. My good buddy Mike Robertson gave me the following little tidbit of information. In Microsoft Outlook you can set an alarm to go off every 15 minutes to remind you to correct your posture. If you don’t use Outlook, go to Wal-Mart and buy a $20 watch with a count down timer on it and set it for 15 minutes.

If you’re looking for faster fat loss, it is essential that you create a situation where your body burns more fat at rest.

While at first this seems impossible, it’s actually VERY possible.

From a scientific standpoint, it’s called cellular disruption.

Basically how it works is that your training session creates such a disturbance in the normal homeostatic environment that your body loves (it hates change…go figure) that it takes hours (even days with the right protocol) for your metabolic processes to return to normal.

During this time of metabolic disturbance your body shifts toward an increased utilization of fats for energy.

If you think this type of training program requires endless aerobic activity, you’d be dead wrong.

If you think it’s about endless sets of high reps, you’re wrong again.

Both of these approaches fail to create an elevated metabolism AFTER you train, and worse yet, you’ll most likely loose precious, metabolically active muscle.

What you need is intensity.

Now I told you that to tell you this.

I spoke at the Midwest Strength, Conditioning, and Rehabilitation Symposium this past year. I was really glad that I did because I got to hang out with some of the top names in the strength and conditioning field like Brian Grasso, Tony Reynolds, Evan Osar, Juan Carlos Santana, Scott Hudson, Lee Taft, and Craig Ballantyne.

Craig was a guy that I was really looking forward to listening to and meeting because we had been communicating for a couple of years, worked on some stuff together, but just never got a chance to meet face to face.

Craig didn’t let me down. Not only does he look like a guy who practices what he preaches (he’s JACKED folks), Craig laid out his entire approach to creating cellular disruption to a large gathering of personal trainers who were feverishly taking notes. I’m sure there was a large number of fitness clients that benefited from their trainer’s new level of training knowledge after that weekend.

Craig doesn’t call his program cellular disruption or metabolic disturbance.

He calls it Turbulence Training (this may be one of my favorite names in all of fitness).

I’ve been lucky to have had access to his program for some time and from day one I was impressed with Craig’s ability to blend the best of science with solid training theory to create one powerful program.

Actually it’s several programs…and I’ve found them to all be effective.

Craig has adapted his training concepts to address trainees of all levels and both sexes. He even eliminates your excuses for missing a training session when there’s no equipment available by providing a full program of body weight exercises.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can see the countless fitness pros that recommend it as well.

Check out TurbulenceTraining.com here.

Later