If you sit a lot throughout the day this is a great exercise to help you get out of the rounded shoulder position and get you back into feeling and sitting taller.
This is a Thoracic Mobility exercise and you can find a video of it by heading to our: Form Fit Mom Community on FB.
It is always my goal to help you and your family move more. So every Thursday, I am dropping a movement snack into your ears to help you and your family move more. Today's movement snack is going to have you down on hands and knees and we're going to work on your thoracic mobility. So this is something that we tend to get very tight from sitting in this rounded forward posture. A lot of times and this is going to help you open up. So you're going to be on hands and knees, and you're going to place one hand, kind of beside your head, I don't want you to go quite behind your head, because I noticed that people will start to try to wrench their head up. And all you're going to do is you're going to have one hand on your head, elbow is out to the side. And then you're going to think about pressing your other hand that's on the floor into the ground. And when you do this, it creates a little rotation of that rib area. So think mid back rotation, rotation through the ribs through the spine, whatever you want to think it's that area, that midsection of your body is going to start to rotate towards that elbow. And that elbow is lifting up. And I'm going to say you want it going up towards the ceiling. But it will probably not reach meaning it won't be pointing to the ceiling because that takes a lot of mobility. Pay attention to what your hips are doing, make sure your hips aren't trying to lift up or turn, we're trying to keep this movement occurring in that mid back that thoracic area rib cage area, that is where your movements occurring. So you're pushing and you're opening, and then you're pulling back down, elbow is going to drop down towards that wrist, and then open back up again. So this is another one of those that's really difficult to explain when I speak to you. So I will let you know that I will link to a video. We also have it in our form fit mom community, we just did this as an exercise. And what you can focus on doing is working through your breathing in this position. So again, if we're on hands and knees, we bring one hand back up to our head, and we're going to drop that elbow first down towards our hand, but we're not bending our elbow or anything. So it's not going to be reaching down towards that hand. It's just turning in towards the hand. And I want you to hold here and I want you to to take a deep breath in in a deep breath out, working on expanding that breath into that back. And then you're going to open up, bringing that elbow up towards the ceiling, pressing through that hand. And again, taking a deep breath in and a deep breath out in that position. We do this a couple of times holding down a deep breath in, deep breath out, coming back up, deep breath in, deep breath out. Do that say two, maybe three times. And then you're going to move into breathing in on the down, breathing out on the up and you want to work through that I would say four times. Do the other side and then sit up and notice if you're feeling a little bit taller, maybe not so rounded shoulders are opened up. This will help this is a great exercise if you are one who has to sit a lot during the day. This is such a good exercise to help you work on opening up those shoulders, getting that upper rounded mid back. I'm not saying upper mid back, because some people have it more high. Some people have that rounding a little bit lower just kind of depends on your posture. But both of those, this helps with that. So that is your movement snack of the week I will post a link for the video for you down below so that you can really see it rather than having to just use this as a visual cue and then also know that you can join us over in the foreign fit mom community. I believe I mentioned this before, but we are doing a 30 day core connection challenge in there. It's each day it's about a five minute video. It's exercises that you can do to help you work on your core. These are not intense x these are not intense AB a exercises that is not what this is. This is about reconnecting your breath to your core, your movement to your core, all different exercises that you can do that focus on that core helping you really feel it and start to reconnect with it. And that is pretty much it. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and make sure to keep moving. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you could do me a favor if you like what you hear. Could you leave us a review or take a screenshot and share your favorite takeaway on social media? And make sure to tag us over at raising underscore healthy humans. Now go out and enjoy more movements throughout your day.