Training people that have experienced signs of aging is one of the most rewarding things for most fitness professionals.
Making your body become more youthful in your fifties and beyond when everyone around you is watching theirs deteriorate is empowering and motivating to everyone else. Your heath is extremely patient, and will respond and reward you for your efforts at any point in life.
When it comes to developing a program for people as they age, individualization is the key. This is because we all express strengths and weaknesses differently. Postural deviations can happen in many different ways and can never be corrected with a cookie cutter program. Postural issues can arise from genetics, lifestyle and activities as well as other factors such as emotional trauma.
My goal isn’t to design a program for you, it would be impossible without first learning about your physical capabilities, lifestyle and your dream. My goal is to provide you with enough information to where you can develop a program for yourself, based upon what you know of your body. I am going to demonstrate postural deviations and provide you with corrective exercises for them, I encourage you to observe yourself and find out which of these apply to you.
Over the next few videos in this series, I will help you fix your posture and develop the alignment and mobility necassary to do more complex exercises than are safe to do right now. Bad posture will limit the variety of exercises available to you, and also limit your ability to function in and around the world.
Today, the focus is the forward head posture and all of the potential issues that arise from it. I am going to talk about the exercises that are and are not safe if you have this deviation and try to help you get aligned properly. Be the master of your own results by contemplating the information and also by observing your unique postural deviations. Stretch only the tight muscles, and try to avoid stretching the muscles that are already turned off or lengthened. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people with an anterior pelvic tilt performing a hamstring stretch thats likely to make the problem worse!
I hope you get some benefit from this video, and even if you don’t have FHP or any other deviation I talk about today, the info should still be relevant in many ways. I will adress other common deviations in the next video in the series of training as you get older.
Thanks for reading,
Peter Hirsh
