Over the years, GMF course alumni have often reported that they lost weight. Occurring too frequently to be coincidence, these testimonials have spurred me to thinking about the weight loss – posture connection. Here are some possible mechanisms:
1. After restoring their primal posture, students are out of pain, feel better, and indulge in the natural human impulse to move and go back to an active life. Read more
Good posture is so important for any workout or athletic endeavor. Exercise of the day: planks!
People often lose their structural integrity by dropping their hips and letting their lower back arch, or by tucking their pelvis, rounding their back, and pushing their shoulders forward.
Left: Poor form marked by dropped hips and arched back. Right: Poor form marked by rounded back and forward shoulders.
It does take more work for your abdominal muscles, particularly your internal obliques, to maintain proper form...but when you're planking, isn't that what you're going for?? Don't fool yourself into thinking you're getting a better workout by doing a longer plank with bad form!
This is our fourth blog post in the series where we put popular exercises under scrutiny to examine how they stack up—or not—against the principles of healthy posture. Here we are looking at “low plank,” a whole-body exercise that particularly develops abdominal strength and trunk stability.
Our model for the photographs is Eric Fernandez, our Gokhale Exercise teacher who teaches the Gokhale Method in the Philadelphia area. Read more