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The Posture Brace Corrector is another gadget we have here in United States, because we love gadgets, that straps over your shoulders and pulls your shoulders back claiming that that’s going to correct your posture. Is that true? Is it going to work? Is it a waste of your time? I’m going to go over all these reasons and some more in this video. I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m here for SolCore Fitness. I’m the owner and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years. I’m a soma therapist and soma trainer, which is under the osteopathic model, like a physical therapist, but more. I’ve seen a lot of really crazy things out there in terms of YouTube and magazines about what to do for fitness and I want to impart my holistic knowledge into this platform so people can see that there’s a much more effective way to work with the body.
The body is built holistic, so if you work with a holistic, it responds perfectly. You can follow me, any of these social media accounts, you can meet with me personally. You can see that I not only own a health and fitness business, I also live a life. If you like what I’m putting out and you want to hear more about this holistic method of training and treating your body, then subscribe to our channel, where I put out new videos about once a week, and you can interact with videos. Let me know what you want to see. I’m more than willing to put up videos on topics that you’re interested in.
The Science Behind Posture Corrector Braces: Can They Truly Fix Your Posture?”
The posture brace corrector is a gadget, a tool that they designed, I don’t know how much it costs, I don’t have one, but I don’t think it’s very much, to correct your posture. Now there’s a lot of different forms of posture, one being good and a bunch being bad. The one to try and correct is, what we call in the industry, forward head posture and kyphosis. It’s a pathology. Forward head posture, just like it sounds, my head is too far forward, in front of my shoulders. And then kyphosis is my back is rounded too much. It’s stuck in this. So it’s a combination of both.
These are problematic. It’s not a good position to be in. Your head, if you’re too far forward… You have a law. It’s called the Law of 22 Degrees. We have a straight line here. Once your head hits 22 degrees, and I have no idea if that’s 22 degrees because I’m the model, you can’t come back because when you bring your head forward, your neck flexes forward, but your spine also slides forward. So it flexes and slides and eventually you get to the point where you can’t come back.
That’s why you see the old people and the walkers with their head down. That’s it. They’re done. That’s not good. Kyphosis is an over rounding of the back. My back should be rounded at a normal amount. It’s called kyphotic. -Osis is a pathology where it’s too much. This is also bad. As you can see, kyphosis one leads to forward head posture because as I round my back and this is locked, my shoulders naturally go forward. As my shoulders naturally go forward, my head slides forward because the table that my head is on is tilted. So it ruins my head posture, but it also ruins my shoulder, which ruins my viscera. You know what you got here? You got lungs, you got your heart, you got a mediastinum, you have a bunch of nerves to go through there. If I reduce the space in there… Obviously your heart and lungs need space to move. They need to be a certain position. Well, that’s problematic.
What contributes to bad posture?
A lot of this bad posture comes from bad posture. It comes from bad training, it comes from bad mechanics of your body, a lot of it comes from desk posture. I’ve got a video at the end that I’ll show you about sitting too long in mid-back pain. It’s one of my earlier ones, so I actually have an exercise in there, which I don’t do anymore. But it talks about, no, this posture and what to do about it. Now, there’s a lot of joints and muscles involved in this bad posture, so we’re going to try and keep it simple. But if you look at your forward head, you have five cervical vertebra with the joints from your bottom of your neck to your mid-back. You get a bunch more from T1 to T9. We’re going to go to just here.
Each one of those joints is involved in having this bad posture because each joint should work independently and have different information and things it does. You also have musculature. As I talked about, as you become kyphotic and as your shoulders move forward, the most important thing is your scapulae, your shoulder blades, move. I’m standing facing this way. These are my shoulder blades. They move what’s called protracted. They move out to the side. When they move out to the side, the shoulders go with it. When the shoulders go with it, now your rhomboids are too flacid and tight. Now your levator scapula, which goes from the area to your head, is too flacid and weak.
Now your pec minor, which goes from your coracobrachialis, which is a little bone right here, to your ribs, your pec major, your latissimus dorsi, your interior deltoid, your biceps… There’s a ton of stuff that become out of place. So if I want to correct my posture, and my body works as a interdependent, interconnected being, then I need to think about each one of those joints, each one of those muscles, the ligaments associated with those muscles, the tendons associated with the muscles associated with the joints. You can see where I’m going here. To just pull the shoulders back, doesn’t seem like it’ll correct the whole posture, but that’s exactly what these companies say. They say “If you just take the shoulders and pull them back, everything’s going to magically go back in place.”
Unveiling the Truth About Posture Corrector Braces: Myths vs. Reality”
That is not the case. I’ve heard arguments about “It reminds me to pull my shoulders back” and stuff like that. Okay, I accept that. But as I mentioned before, there’s a whole bunch of other things that need to happen. It’s not just a shoulders back. It’s more important to get the shoulder blades back, the scapulae. It’s the articulation, the movement of the thoracic spine to allow my shoulders to go back. It’s the strength and articulation of the C-spine, the neck, to go back and to be aware. It’s the loosening of the tight, possibly weak muscles in the front of your body, your anterior muscles, that need to be worked. I don’t see how one thing put on your shoulders, pulling back, can do all those things. It can’t. There’s no way that happens. But like most things, they take one aspect of one thing you need to do and they go, “Okay, if one thing happens, everything else should fall in place.” That’s not how the body works.
The body works as an interconnected, interdependent thing. That means it needs to work together. It needs to communicate. They need to be a certain place. Everybody needs to do their job, communicate to each other that I’m doing the job, to help everybody else doing their job. Having an external source on your body stops that from happening. Did you shell out some money for a posture brace corrector? I generally want to know how it went for you. Did it work? Did it not work? Just let me know in the comments.
Where to focus when correcting your posture
If you really want to work on your posture, if that’s a goal of yours, then it needs to be a multifaceted, holistic activity. First and foremost, you need to be aware of your posture. You need to be aware of what your body’s doing. Whatever you need to do. If you have a desk job, you need to make sure that you’re looking at the top third of the screen that you’re sitting ergonomically, that you’re not slumping over or sitting in a chair with your laptop. As you sit in your chairs or walk around in your life, you need to be aware of your posture.
But that’s not enough because you need to retrain your body to have posture. Exercise is there to educate. To educate means to tell the body what to do, because you shouldn’t have to think about your posture all the time. It’s good to be aware. But if you’re constantly telling yourself to pull your shoulders back and to sit tall, that’s going to last for… I don’t know, a minute? Because eventually it’s going to get tired, you’re going to forget, you’re doing something else, you’re going to lose it. But if you tell the body what to do in different parts, which I’ll talk about here in a second, then it just does it naturally. That’s what you want. You want your body to just do its job.
Before you work out though, you want to be hydrated. Because if I don’t hydrate my tissue, because soft tissue, if I exercise it, it makes things worse. So you start by hydration. You need to make sure you have plenty of sleep because if my cortisol levels all over the place and I’m stressed out and I’m not repairing myself at night, it doesn’t matter what you do. You’re going to be all jacked up. Once you do get to working out, then you need to go through each of these different areas to educate them, to strengthen them, to loosen them.
I want to do an exercise for each one of my joints of my spine. Each one should be a different one, not one for all. The best I’ve found are ELDOAs. They’re an exercise to open up, strengthen, wake up, make more aware each joint. Now it’s smarter, now it moves more. I need to strengthen my rhomboids, both of them, major and minor. I need to strengthen them, though, with my arms above the glenohumeral joint because biomechanics says that when I have it above, my shoulder blades move together, which allows my rhomboids to stay fixed and to work. I’ve seen a lot of videos where they have them down below. That doesn’t work as well. Works your lats more.
You need to strengthen the levator scapulae because after I strengthened my rhomboids with the butterflies, my shoulder blades will go back. Great. Now I need to strengthen my levator scapulae to pull my head back in place. With that in place, with my joints open in my spine, now I’ve taught my body, but more importantly my brain, what I wanted to do. Because when you train, you want to develop what’s called a new motor engram. When you develop bad posture, you develop a motor engram, an idea in your brain, of how your body should be.
I see this all the time in my studio. I’ll have somebody set up for a posture and their head is off to the side. They think that’s straight. I’ll move their head straight and go, “That’s where your head should be.” And they’re like, “I’m going to fall off to the right.” I’m like, “No, you’re not.” Because that motor engram in the brain said, “This is straight.” So you need to train your body to go, “This is straight.” This is what I was talking about before, that the body should just do its job.
Once you have the new motor engram, I now have a better plumb line. Now my ear, shoulder, hip, knee, and ankle line up. I now have what’s called a better gravity line, which is an inverse 40 degree cone that goes around your body because now everything is doing its job. Everything’s stacked in place where it’s supposed to be. And now I can manage myself in this four degree cone. Because when I have bad posture, I’m outside that cone, which means all the musculature needs to work. So in general, for a gravity line, when I’m here, my body’s not lazy, but it’s working not a lot. It’s just managing a little here, a little there, a little here to keep me in place. It uses less energy.
If I’m out with this bad posture and now I’m a little outside of four degree cone and I’m more anterior, which means forward, now all these muscles here are trying to hold me up because I need to walk forward, because I need to see where I’m going, because I need to eat my food. I need to drink my water. The idea of the body is like, “I want to survive. If my head’s too far down, I’m going to end up dying.” But now you’re making all these postural muscles, which should work a little here, a little there. You’re making them work with a bigger action, more than they should be doing, which causes more dysfunction.
There’s a lot of other places you need to work too, because again, the body works holistically. It works as one. It is not just about those little areas I just talked about. You need to train your feet because information from your feet to your brain to tell you where you are in space. You need to train your costovertebral and your sternocostal joints, your ribs, basically. Because if my ribs are tight and compressed, it won’t allow my thoracic cage to move. You need to myofascial stretch. I choose myofascial stretching because it works holistically with the body, the different muscles the pec minor, that pec major, the latissimus dorsi, anterior deltoid, the biceps. Because again, I want to train my body where I have dysfunction, but also respect the connections and the rest of my body. That, for me, is a good way to correct your posture.
Exploring the Effectiveness of Posture Corrector Braces in Improving Posture
Now we go back to do I think the posture-based corrector is good? I would say no. I would say no because even if it does remind you to pull your shoulders back, it’s a false hope. Like, “It’s reminding me to pull my shoulders back,” but it’s not doing anything else. And the further you stay in dysfunction, the harder it is to get out of this dysfunction. The longer you stay in this position, the more your body adapts to that position. Even if I remember to pull my shoulders back a little bit, the rest of my body is not being trained, and truthfully, my shoulders aren’t being trained to pull back the way they should be pulled back via the scapulae and the rhomboids. So I’m making the dysfunction worse.
I know people like these gadgets because you don’t have to work, and I could pay 20 bucks, whatever it is, and I can put it on and all of a sudden, magical fairies sprinkle dust on me, and everything happens. But that’s not the case with the body. You have this beautiful body. It is here to do these beautiful things. All it wants from you is to show a little love back, a little love to keep itself in balance, and it’ll keep doing whatever you want in your life until you decide to lie down one day and die. For me, personally, I am not going to leave my life and the way my body is up to some gadget that does this much of what I totally need.
Phew. I got a little more fired up about that than I thought I would. It’s just that I really believe in living this life to its fullest. And I don’t like when people sell products, purely to make a buck, with partial information and false hope to people. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who come in after using these gadgets, not just a posture brace, but that the psoas one and the FasciaBlaster and all these things. These people make good money. It doesn’t help you at all. In fact, it takes you backwards. I really believe in training the body holistically.
If you like what I said, if you’re more interested in finding out information around that, then I’ve got some options for you. First and foremost, I’ve got a free Facebook group. It’s SolCore Fitness, my business, Strength, Mobility, and Flexibility for Active People. It’s all about learning how to train your body holistically so it functions at its best so that your body can keep up with the life that you want to live. It’s an interactive group, so people ask questions. I put out mini trainings, two-minute videos on different topics I find interesting, I put out blog posts and stuff like that. And then I also do challenges which are three to five days, interactive. I pick a topic, I go through information and we go through specific stretches, exercises relative to that topic.
I also do master classes. So again, I take a topic and I really go in depth about it, but it’s interactive. People are asking questions, we’re trying to go back and forth so I can try and enlighten you more as to the way that I think you should work your body. If you’re not into that, you’re not into Facebook, no problem. I also have a free ebook. It’s called Get Out of Pain, Get Mobile, and Get to the Life You want to Live. Four steps. You can download it with the description below and you get instant access.
Or if you’re ready to go, if you want to talk more about what this training is like, then schedule a call with me. Use, in the description below, the link to schedule a time with me. We’ll go over what you’re doing, what your sticking points are, where you want to go. And if I see you’re a good fit, I’ll mention how you can work with me. But if not, no matter what, I’m going to give you valuable information as to what I view is a way forward for you.
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