Help Your Body Use Your Phone to Help You!! 🏋️‍♂️ 📱 😄

Apple is the about to put out the new iphone so of course its time to talk about phones again. 

Just the way life is today, for some of us, we have to always have our phones in reach for work, to reach out to family, entertainment, and so many other things. 

With the amount of time we spend interacting with our phones, and even our tablets and computers, it's a given that it will affect our bodies in some way eventually. And a lot of how we use our phones an other technology shows up in our posture. 

I could try to come up with 5 reasons why Phones are the most horrible thing ever or I can tell you this cool simple truth. 

You can address all of this with a few SIMPLE exercises and a couple of stretches through out the week. And by doing so you may even relieve yourself of a few little aches and pains, and lower the likely hood of being injured. 

You should hear me out, I'm just sayin'

One of the main ways we're seeing the use of our phones is in our our shoulder, neck and head area. We get stuck in whats called a kyphotic posture. Thats just when your head rest in front of your chest instead of resting above your shoulders while standing. You'll most likely have rounding at the shoulders and sinking in at the chest. 

These thing can lead to instability in our bodies that could set us up for injury or even just cause us some discomfort throughout the day which can be a real "pain in the neck." 😉

The the way we use our phones has the tendency to affect our muscle in a way that certain muscles become stretched and weak, and other become short and tight. The good news is we use our bodies to fight some of the ways our muscles adapt to our phones. 

Lets Address the Posture Now

Our Man Goal is to get your chest out of the sunken place, which can be done in 2 simple steps...

Step 1: Release tight muscles

One of the major parts of caving in at the chest is tight pectoral (or chest) muscles. We want to help ease some of that tension by doing stretches for your chest. Simple static doorway stretches for a warm up or just through out the day a few time will go a long way.

Stretch to the point of tension at the muscle for about 30 secs each stretch. Play around with different angles and stretch what feels tight to you. 

Some other muscles it would be worth while to address would be your upper traps and levator muscles.

I personally like to hit this with a massage ball, an our a foam roller. Just find a tender spot and rest over it of about 30 secs or until you feel the muscle release.

Step 2: Strengthen weak muscles. 

Along with the muscle we have to spend time releasing we also have to strengthen a few muscle to help us maintain a nice healthy posture. One of the main muscles we'd be looking to hit would be our rhomboids. They really help us poke our chest out, retract our scapulae, and keep our shoulders in a nice healthy position.  

One of my main "bread and butter" exercise I like to use for this is bent over YTA's.

With the YTA's is important that you use a LIGHT WEIGHT to ensure that the correct muscles are doing the work. It really may even be better to use no weight at all or just a couple of cans of beans. You want to make sure to squeeze at the top of the contraction and let the weight down slow. Don't rush while releasing the weight, take about 3 to 4 seconds, controlling the weight as you let it down. 

May look something like this. 

You should also feel this in your lower traps and posterior delt (shoulder) muscles, which also help us to maintain good posture. 

Overall, we have to have our phones but we also need to know how to live with these tools that we love to use so much. Try these stretches and exercises out a few times a week of the next month and see if  you notice any changes in posture or simply how you feel. 

If you have any other way that you like to use your phone to stay healthy or strategies you use to maintain a healthy relationship with your phone please let me know in the comments, I'd love to hear from you as well!!