Best Mobility Drills For Posture & Pain Relief

Dr. Jenny Ochoa shows us how to feel better and stay better:

Ease your spine

The problem is that things such as prolonged sitting, desk work, scrolling, and time spent becoming one with the couch, all train your back into flexion, and thus stiffen your thoracic spine. This means that your neck and lower back often compensate, contributing more pain, poor posture, breathing restriction, and, as a special encore, inefficient movement that keeps the vicious cycle going.

The solution is simple: since daily life already overloads spinal flexion, intentionally train thoracic extension and rotation to restore balance.

Here are some exercises to do just that:

• Elevated elbow thoracic stretch: put your elbows on a bench, box, bed, or wall, sit your hips back, and drop your chest and head down while breathing deeply through your nose and out your mouth; use each exhale to sink deeper, prioritizing breath cycles over time.
• Foam roller thoracic extensions: put a foam roller under your upper back, cross a leg to help stabilize your lower back, keep your ribs down with abdominal tension, and extend segment by segment over the roller without flaring your ribs; reposition yourself gradually up and down your thoracic spine to target stiff areas.
• Larger roller or wheel extension: use a larger roller against your middle back, while sitting your hips back to lock your lower back, then move from flexion into extension with coordinated breathing, to isolate your thoracic movement.
• Foam roller thread-the-needle: from all fours, rotate one arm underneath your body while keeping the opposite hand planted on the floor, dropping your shoulder towards the ground; a resistance band can be used to increase the stretch and rotational demand, as soon as you feel ready for that.
• Quadruped rotation: place one hand behind your head, rotate your elbow from your opposite wrist towards the ceiling while keeping your support arm straight, and actively push through your grounded hand, prioritizing range of movement.
• Prone floor rotation: lie on the floor with your arms in a Y position, keep your hips grounded, and rotate your thumbs upwards towards the ceiling (while focusing motion through your thoracic spine rather than your lower back).

Bonus:

Partner-assisted extension: maintain locked hips and lower back, while a partner guides your arms and chest into deeper thoracic extension, for a stronger passive stretch.

For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Stop Pain Spreading ← our main feature on the topic of “referred pain”, i.e. when the consequences of one set of pain gives us extra pain somewhere else, which then gives us extra pain somewhere else, which then… You get the idea. Check out the article to see how to stop it 😎

Take care!