Watch as our team shows you how to improve your posture. Poor posture can cause pain or lead to additional damage of existing injuries to the shoulder and neck. Get tips to have better posture today.

Video Transcript:

Hello my name is Andrew, and I’m a physical therapist here at XO Orthopedics. Today’s tip is going to be about posture and how it influences neck and shoulder pain. Just a quick assessment about what you’re probably doing right now As far as looking at your phone and looking at your computer, your posture is probably pretty bad. so we’re going to try to reassess that and figure out how we can kind of change that permanently. Posture has a lot to do with our habits. We built habits along the road as far as kind of letting our body slouch. So today’s tip is going to be to help address that in permanently changing that. so a lot of posture, what it is, as far as our shoulders are rounded, our head is kind of forward like that. That puts a lot of pressure, on our neck, that puts a lot of pressure on our shoulders, and which could cause further damage to our shoulders. something like a rotator cuff tear, or cervical disc herniation. what I want to do today is to teach you how to re-educate yourself. so what you want, what I want you to do is, I want you to kind of, sit upright. I want you to come slouch the ugliest that you can, and then I want you to military correct, and then find something in the middle. so when you look at yourself on the side of you, your shoulders should be in line with your ears, and so that’s a good posture for you. Another way to do it, just kind of raise your hands as high as you can, and then just kind of relax your arms and relax your head. I want you to try to do this when you’re doing three things: when you’re looking at your phone, when you check your emails, or when you’re looking at your watch. okay when you’re doing those things, I want you to check yourself, self test yourself as far as what’s my posture looking like? ‘how does it look right now?’ ‘can I make it better?’ It’s all about building habits. it’s all about changing the way you do things. Because if you continue to round those shoulders, and that neck forward, that has a lot of pressure in your neck and in your shoulders.