You may have heard that strengthening your ‘core’ by doing core exercises can help with low back pain. This is true, but what exactly is your core? Most people think of their core as their abdominal muscles, but this is only looking at one piece of the puzzle.

For correcting posture, one of the most challenging aspects is maintaining healthy posture throughout the day. There are no devices or postural supports that will fix your posture for you. You’ve got to put in the work if you want posture like a red carpet celebrity. I recommend you make three commitments if you want to improve your posture.

As a physical therapist and movement specialist, I treat from a holistic approach focusing beyond physical injury. This means that I consider other variables contributing to pain and healing potential including sleep patterns, nutrition, occupational hazards, and possible stressors. This recognition of the complexity of pain and injury led me to seek additional education by becoming a yoga teacher to serve as a way to teach the connection of the mind and the body. This connection is made stronger by having a strong practice in learning how to breathe.

Whether it’s on social media or in other forms of advertising, you’re bombarded with appealing figures of individuals with ripped abs. You assume they’re healthy. I’ve treated many of these individuals and I can assure you, many of them are not healthy. Not at all.

As a physical therapist, I often hear from my clients, “I sit at a desk all day and I know I have horrible posture. That’s probably why my neck hurts, right?”. This idea generally comes from social media posts, posture “corrector” gadgets, and posture being the historical blame for every neck and back issue if you have a desk job. But here is the kicker — there is no perfect posture. That’s right, I said it. And this is what I reiterate to my physical therapy clients time and time again to break the negative cycle about posture being the cause of their pain.

Yoga is a centuries-old practice but oftentimes, teachers have not adapted the style of teaching to reflect the demands of modern day life. If we take a critical lens to the demands of the modern worker, we see more sitting, phone use, and overall sedentary lifestyle than ever before. These prolonged postures have an effect on our muscles and posture in a way that we may not be aware of when we walk into a yoga class.

Someone asked me this question the other day and I immediately wrote it down. That's because it was probably the 800th time I’ve been asked about inversion tables. And while I have answered this question many times, I've never done any formal research on it.

Are you going stir crazy at home during this COVID-19 pandemic? We recommend these tips and measures to keep you going strong, and to prepare your body for other, more strenuous physical activities.

Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) is a clinical education program started in Lincoln, Nebraska by a physical therapist, Ron Hruska, over 30 years ago. He looked at the human body as being asymmetrical. The muscular, neurological, respiratory, circulatory, and vision systems are not the same on the left side of the body as they are on the right side. They have different responsibilities, functions, positions and demands placed on them.

Exercising with pelvic floor dysfunction can be scary, whether you are a mom who just had a baby, a dad who is recovering from prostate cancer surgery, or a CrossFitter who began leaking urine during certain lifting exercises. Regardless, you want to lead a healthy, active and strong lifestyle, but instead you are fearful of making things worse.