Good Posture Part II: Forward Head Posture

Do you have good posture?

If you missed Part I in the series of posts I’m doing for Good Posture Correction you can see it here.

As mentioned in Part I, too much time spent sitting while at school, work, and on the computer has made our posture crap. But there are ways in which our training and lifestyle can correct these problems and increase our performance and physical appeal.

Today lets look at the forward neck posture. This one is most common in those who sit at a computer desk half their life and tend to poke there chin forward to read the letters on the screen. This is equally as bad during high school years when kids have trouble reading the chalk board or overhead projector. There’s a price for being the cool kid in the back.

Forward head posture can affect core stability and ultimately affect power output in athletic movements because of muscular compensation throughout the rest of the body.

Basically, unaligned body parts will tend to produce other unaligned body parts. Think of a car’s alignment, the difference is our muscles will adapt and compensate.

How do we fix this?

Unlike rounded shoulders, forward head posture involves much smaller muscle groups. There are many muscles in the neck that can effect one’s head posture so for the purposes of this post we will just call them either Neck Flexors or Neck Extensors.

Once again lets look at the muscles that are Overdeveloped (shortened) and the ones that are weakened (lengthened).

Overdeveopled:
– Neck Extensors
*These tilt the head up (look at the ceiling)

Weakened (lengthened):
– Neck Flexors
*These tuck the chin under (make a double chin)

As we know by now, in order to help correct this postural imbalance we need to strengthen the weakened muscles and stretch the overdeveloped ones.

Here are a couple stretches you can use to stretch the Neck Extensors:

A great corrective exercise we can use to Strengthen the neck flexors are resisted chin tucks:

Final Thoughts

Performing squats, rows, and any exercise with your head tilted up is going to make correcting head posture much more difficult so quit looking up and maintain that neutral spine. This in itself is a strengthening exercise and will speed up the correction. Although some may say doing this will not allow you to get maximum activation of all the muscles innervated by C1-C7 and thus reduce strength.

The neck is often forgotten about when we talk about training for fat loss and bodybuilding but it makes a difference in performance and overall aesthetics, so get down to the ground and start doing chin tucks. You’ll only look funny doing it for 5 minutes ;)