Hey Dr. McNamara here at McLaughlin Care. And I am going to talk to you today about posture. Now, everybody always asks me what is the perfect posture? And the truth is there's only one perfect posture and it's for each individual and it's different for everybody. So we're going to work on it today. And really what you want with posture is you want to have the correct muscle length, tension relationship. So you're not putting stress on your joints. That is going to increase risks of developing osteoarthritis and develop degenerative joint disease.
So what we mainly look for as a side view is we want our ears to be over our shoulders, over our hips, over our knees, over our ankles, and a little bit of extra rotation of the shoulders. We don't want to be rounding forward, and we don't want to have that anterior pelvic tilt. And what happens when we do have this kind of posture, the reason is we have muscle imbalances. So I'm going to talk about some quick ways to improve these muscle imbalances. Starting with first is that rounded forward shoulders. And that forward head translation. This is also known as upper cross syndrome. So what we want to strengthen in this case is these muscles called the rhomboids as well as the trapezius that's in between our shoulder blades.
And here's a nice little exercise. That'll help do that. You come up to the wall, trying to get your heels against the wall, so then tilt your pelvic forward. And this also helped with that pelvic tilt as well. And you want to have your low back touch, your mid back, touch your arms and your wrists and hands. And then what you want to do from that is you want to keep everything nice and contracted and do little, we call these wall angels, and this is really going to pull those shoulders back, put it into external rotation and activate those round boys and trapezius to pull our shoulder blades together, to keep our neck and our shoulders in line.
The next one I want to talk about is the pelvic tilt. The main thing I want you to focus on with this one is keeping your core tight, cause when we contract our core, it's going to tilt that pelvis as well as keeping the glutes because it's going to pull the opposite direction. And if you just think about tightening those muscles at all times, it's going to pull your pelvis in the correct position and it's going to relieve pain. Now, if you have certain problems activating these muscles, that'd be a great time to see your chiropractor.
There's great evidence showing that chiropractic adjustments actually improve the motor control of the abdominal muscles. So we'll link to that research for you and you can check it out until then work on your posture guys. And we'll see in the office when you need our help.
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