Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I am the Get Fit Guy.

Aside from being a way to look good in family photos, good posture is actually the way that we distribute our body's weight onto our tissues so that they can easily and efficiently

respond and adapt to that weight. As you can likely guess, this is much more nuanced than simply

standing up straight like our parents or our teachers instructed us to do as kids.

Simply put, good posture means that each

of your body parts is in the correct spot relative to your other body parts and relative to the

gravitational pull of the earth. Makes sense? Can you do that? Well, great. Then we're done here.

Well, probably not. If only it were that easy.

You know, when you heard me say the words, good posture, you probably instinctively and immediately assumed your version of good posture.

If you didn't, then go ahead and straighten up now.

What did you do to improve your posture? Did you thrust your chest up, or did you pull your shoulder blades together, or perhaps both?

Well, doing that may give the impression of good posture, but more accurately, all it did was lift your rib cage forward by shearing your vertebrae

and then mashing your shoulder blades together. That doesn't sound good, does it? When you're slouching

forward, simply misaligning your ribs like this, does not actually create the movement in your

thoracic spine in the way that you think or even feel that it does.

All it actually does is take that slouching forward curve of your upper spine and tilt it into an

upward position. The curve is still there. It's simply pointing in a different direction.

You see, many of us stand at least slightly lazily at all times,

trying to conserve energy and feel relaxed. To do that, we stand with our neck jutted out,

our shoulders slumped, our rib cage collapsed, our weight shifted onto one hip or the other,

or maybe even just thrust forward into both, and our feet flared out like a duck.

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