Wall Angels: Posture Exercise for the ages
I’ve been prescribing this exercise for over 10 years … it has many postural benefits and can help you feel muscles you never knew you had. Leaning against the wall will help you get the correct position and ensure the right muscles are engaged.
Quite often, the muscles along the back of your trunk and spine lie in a stretched, inactive position while your body is rounded forward over your desk/phone/tablet. A common complaint from people is that their back feels stiff and sore.
In my experience, I find that the muscles have actually been overstretched all day and are just crying out for some attention.
The front side of the body, such as the chest muscles, the biceps, and the hip flexors, are generally scrunched up and shortened all day long, while the opposite is occurring on the back side of our bodies, such as our mid backs and glute muscles. It is easy to say we need to stretch the chest and strengthen the back. However, what tends to happen is we hit the gym and start doing the traditional Seated Row and Lat Pulldowns in order the strengthen our backs. But are we actually training the muscles we think we are targeting ?
When you sit at a desk, drive your car, cook dinner, and even while you exercise, it is easy for our mid-back muscles to lie dormant and be over powered by our dominant muscles, such as your pecs (chest), upper traps (upper shoulders), and deltoids (side of shoulders). When you get to the gym and start your back exercises, this pattern can continue, and you can actually over utilise these same dominating muscles.
Even though you are training a “back” exercise, you might be reinforcing poor posture and not getting the most out of your training.
Read more in our previous post How Poor Posture Can Effect Your Training.
What can you do to help re-activate these weak muscles of the mid-back? A great starting point is with Balanced Posture Online’s Wall Angels. Using the wall is a great way to get proper position, use correct form, and finally get those muscles working. You should feel the muscles between the shoulder blades and the hips, as well as the sides of the trunk and ribs getting quite a workout. Make sure to keep the abs engaged, the knees soft, and the shoulders down away from the ears. Follow the video below, and sign up for more details with our 6 Weeks to Better Posture program available now.
Try this before your next workout and see if you can feel the difference! Perform 2 sets of 10 as part of your warm-up to help activate this area before you train.
