A Winning Strategy With Better Posture | Pediatric Chiropractor in West Omaha, NE
Hi there. I’m Dr. Jeremiah Sample and with me today is my son Frederick, where here at Family First Chiropractic to talk about kids and their habits and their posture.
Maintaining a Neutral Spine
Now, my son, the well adjusted chiropractic child that he is normally sits with perfect posture all day long. Doing his homework during his studies, reading the classics, but on occasion when he does get some free time, he might use what a lot of kids out there use now since it’s been around since so six, many of the kids now have been born into the handheld digital generation. Alright, so when using a phone, preferably, he’s got the phone up front of his face, keeping a neutral spine with the head above the shoulders above the hips. Now, as many of you know, this is how most of your children use their phones. But there are a few out there that may be adopted different sorts of posture.
Improper Posture has Long-Term Consequences
Yeah, that looks pretty familiar, right. What happens when he does is it puts a dangering stress on his thoracic spine the junction between his cervical spine and his thoracic spine, and puts a lot of forward head posture and weight here with his head that goes down and transfers into these discs, choking off the nerves and the blood supply. Now, the longer that he continues to do this, the more likely that he’ll start to break down those discs, cause early degenerative disc and the ability for arthritis to creep in. Now. Another thing that kids tend to do now is play video games. And once again, when playing video games, of course, my son would be sitting upright controller ready. For the limited amount of time, he might play video games here today. 5-10 minutes, max. Now some play video game for longer because I understand it takes more than almost an hour to log on to a video game nowadays. The posture adapts to that very similar to the phone posture if you’d like to show them. Yes, this is how oftentimes I find him and his friends. Now a good idea to do is to break up the time that you’re using the phone and the video games with an alarm in order to adopt some postural exercises.
Simple Posture Strengthening Exercises
The first exercise that we’ll show is going to be the wall angel. The wall angel is a wonderful exercise to set an alarm to so if you’re going to be playing video games for extended amount of time or your child is using the phone, it’s good to break it up with this exercise that allows for movement and thoracic spine reinforces the musculature of the cervical spine and takes a lot of pressure off his shoulders. Now, to begin with, you’re going to put your head, shoulders and hips against the wall. Alright, you got to bring your arms up to 90 degrees, straight out. Way to help balance yourself against the wall is bringing your feet further out. Okay. Bring them a little more. There we go. This also helps to make it so he doesn’t look so tall standing next to me. All right. So with this exercise, while keeping the head shoulders and hips against the wall, rhetoric is going to take his arms straight up from where his hands are. Now when he does this is always going to end at a slight angle. Right. So straight up from there. See how the end and an angle. Now as he inhales he’s going to bring his arms back down to that 90 degrees. Then on the exhale, drive them straight back up. Repeat this 10 times right from the starting position. There’s a variation to this. It also helps get the legs moving the hips moving and activates the lower body.
The Wall Angel Exercise
So this time, Frederick is going to keep his hands right where they’re at. And instead of sliding his arms up, he’s not going to just walk down keeping his head shoulders and hips against the wall until his arms go straight up then, and on the exhale, he’s going to drive back up to the 90 degrees. Repeat this 10 times. Alright, lecture on adding these exercises in throughout the day. When you’re utilizing the phone when you’re having breakdowns in posture really helps keep the head upright above the shoulders above the hips and as we know, postures a window our spine and our spine is definitely the window to our health.
Thank you very much for watching with us today. If you have any questions about posture of a child, your own kids posture or questions in general, please comment below and we’ll get back to you!
