How Tall People Can Improve Their Posture ft. Chiropractor Dr. David Lipman

Good morning everybody. You are currently listening to a Tall Girls podcast hosted by a tall girl named India. I hope everyone who is tuning in today is doing super fantastic. We have a very very special guest with us here today. Funny thing about it is that it's not the usual guests that I would have on here. Usually I interview other tall women or women who own tall brands, but we have somebody who is fits a different category. Hi, David, how are you doing today? Thanks for having me here today. India, I am superhuman and getting younger by the day. Thanks for asking. I absolutely love that response. Can you please just introduce yourself to the audience. Sure, well, Doctor David Littman. I'm a chiropractor physician here in Boca Raton, Florida, and my sort of life's journey and journey for my professional life too, is all about how do we optimize our bodies you know, function in terms of healing and being healthy and staying healthy and you know, actually not succumbing to you know, the aging process. But actually, why can't we get stronger as we get older? Why can't we improve all of our physical attributes with some investment instead of just saying, well, after forty, it's all downhill. So that's what my personal life and my professional lives dedicated to. And obviously there's many layers to that. Thank you for that introduction. And I think that a major major topic, especially because you know, you're very knowledgeable about health and wellness, and a major topic of discussion when it comes to the tall community is relating to posture. We struggle with posture in our day to day lives, not even necessarily just you know, working or sitting at a laptop or anything, but even just doing day to day activities like cleaning, washing dishes. I literally spoke about that all my stories yesterday or even sleeping, and you know, I wanted to ask you can you talk a little bit about posture and the importance of it. Absolutely. I mean it's something I really get to talk about every day with all my patients, you know, regardless, you know, the height posture. You know, we always think of it as you know, this like aesthetic kind of standing up straight kind of thing, but posture is really so much more than that. It's much more of a fluid and dynamic thing in terms of how our bodies are bearing weight and how we're moving, and when we say perfect posture, what we're really talking about is how our muscular skeletal system, which is what we're looking at as posture affects our organ systems and our circulatory systems and our digestive systems. That's where posture goes beyond just the sort of aesthetics. And granted, you know, having back pain because of let's say, quote unquote poor posture. Is you know, as a condition. And the importance I think I want you know, the audience and everybody that comes into my office to understand is that posture is much more of a function of having your muscular skill system be optimized, so your weight bearing and your movement is also optimized, optimizing all those other processes I mentioned within the body itself. So I want people to expand their thought on posture and not just how good you look standing up straight. Yeah that is that sounds really awesome. And you know you did say that you speak about posture a lot with your patients. What is like one of the most common reasons that you've seen as to why people have quote unquote quote posture. So another great question. I find that what we do in our daily lives tend to. Mold us, mold our posture. As an example, you know, now more than ever, a lot of people sit for work. You know, when I was a kid, there were no computers, and most people that worked it was some kind of manual labor, or if they were more of an executive, they would have a desk, but they weren't sitting typing at a computer per se. And so the tasks of a daily life, you know, in various scenarios, is what is going to mold somebody. Here's another kind of example. You know a lot of people last you know, a bit of the day, they might sit on a couch and watch television for an hour or two. How you sit in that couch, and if you always tend to sit in that same place on the couch is going to tend to start to shift your muscular skill of a weight bearing. So then when you are walking and you are standing, that shift has already kind of become the new you know, dysfunctional imbalance. I'll call it. Call it which is which is going to affect postures. So what I try to get people to start thinking about that. Come in here, because you know, many people access me because of pain, And I want them to take a look at what's happening every day, What are your stressors that are molding you and if so, once you identify them, how can you mitigate some of that where it's possible. As an example, can you get a stand up desk where you can need to have the option of standing and sitting. And you know, also can you be. Dedicated to unwind the dysfunctional tension that builds up from a daily activity of sitting at a computer and be willing to do that so that doesn't get ahead of you to restore posture through proper you know, exercise, mobility, functional kind of training, so that that's not going to have a negative impact on you, as you know, maybe it has been up to this point. I like how you spoke about even something as simple as when you're sitting and watching television can ultimately affect how we stand, how we sit, how our posture just in general. And you know, I think it's really important to also be because of that. I think it's also very important to be aware of the consequences of you know, what you're doing on the day to day, like what types of bodily issues with types of problems. I guess physical problems can that lead to if you're sitting or standing incorrectly? Yeah, So again, you know, I'm going to take it back to how our bodies are such an incredible interactive system. Every system affects every system. So again, a muscular skeletal system affects our circulatory system, our nervous system, our digestive system. And when you. Think in those terms, in order for all the systems to be optimized, you have to start with what is going to be the effect of having a negative posture let's say, you know, on all these other systems, and understanding that really has to be something that you would dedicate yourself and invest in yourself and do things proactively to make sure you minimize those negative potential effects. So again, looking at your daily habits and activity is very important to see again, how can you minimize things that will distort posture? And the drop down effect is you know. Maybe you know, for a woman, maybe her menstrual cycles are going to start to be much more uncomfortable as an example, because yeah, absolutely, because you know, congestion at the muscular skeletal level will interrupt flow, will cause more pressure and when things aren't flowing properly. That means we're not removing waste products as much as we should. So things can build up. Information builds up, and there's a lot of cause of information, of course, but when you look at how you know, poor posture, negative posture starts to invest affect all those systems. Things like you know, a raylar, thing like a mental cycle can absolutely be affected. And I've had so many women patients over the years, starting from when I started out in the nineteen eighties that might have come to me for low back pain and then continue to do the chiropractic, do some of the exercises I've prescribed to restore them and you know, maximize their posture and again posture not just from the static but from the fluid and the dynamic aspect. And say, you know, I don't know if this is related, but you know I used to get really bad period Cramson, I don't get that anymore. Is that you know, is that a coincidence? I said, no, it's not a coincidence. Or I used to have really. Bad digestive issues, and you know now I'm not having that even to the extreme where men and women have had. Just extreme pain. Even after eating a meal, and you know, they'll go to the doctor in doctor says, oh you have a hiacial hernia or oh you have reflux, and they'll try to put them on some drugs, when all that's really happening is those internal muscles, paraspinal muscles, pelvic muscles are so tight because the skeletal system is just not optimally supporting that person and moving. So those congestions can really have a big, big impact on. All of those internal systems. So I think if I wanted one message to get across the people to understand that posture is not just about you know, having rounded shoulders and you know, looking poorly when you're standing up street. It's so much more impactful than that. That is absolutely fascinating and probably a little bit scary, not gonna lie, And I'm pretty sure that none of us wants that to happen to us, especially tall people, because we're more likely to have sit in correctly, standing correctly, even sleeping correctly. So I was wondering if you could just share some daily lifestyle habits that I mean, yes, us tall people, but honestly everyone can adopt to improve and maintain that our posture. Absolutely. So. I have one of my two daughters, my four children, my younger daughter, she's just shy of six feet tall. So from the time she was in kindergarten, she was a head taller than all the kids, and so she had to go through a lot of things because of height, more so as she got probably into her teenage years, because she was, you know, always a head taller than everybody else. And you know, as you probably know in your audience probably knows, there's a tendency for tall people, men and women of course, to you know, slouch their shoulders and kind of lean down because most of the people that are communicating with her, you. Know, way down there. So when I started to see that and my daughter, I said, you know something, honey, I said, let them strain their next looking up to you, because you don't need to feel, first of all, uncomfortable about being tall. The second thing is is that it's going to start to bother you and it's going to cause problems down the road. Maybe not when you're fifteen, sixteen, but by the time you're in your thirties and forties. Those habits and that normal posture of yours, which really isn't It is going to cause an increase in wear and tear on your system. So I was able to encourage her to, you know, forget the social part of it. Let people look up to her. You know, don't accommodate that just because you know you're tall, you know they can meet you. You stay up tall because it's going to be much more important to your later health and current health too to do that. So think of that mindset, but also the kinds of exercises that need to be done to maintain mobility and strengthen the proper balance. Let me give you another example. You know, in recent years, people understand the need for a strong quote unquote core. So the statement is true. However, it makes it sound like that it's only one section that has to be strong. It's one of many sections that have to be interactive together and solid and functional together for the whole structure to work. So it's not just about getting stronger abs or short and lower back muscles. It's how the whole system interacts and understanding as an example, that your lower back muscles and your glutes need to be stronger than the abdominal muscles in the front for that proper angle of skeletal correctness. From a postural standpoint, a lot of people are going to work a lot of their abs, but they don't address the lower back muscles, you know as well, or because of sitting, the hip flexers, the soas muscles which are deep in the pelvis in the front, they actually attach the spine to the hip. So when they're tight and they're not moving properly, it puts a lot of stress on the spine and it gets the hamstrings to try to compensate because the gluteal muscles are not going to fire properly, and not to go too much down the rabbit hole. But these are very specific mechanisms in the body, and so to have proper posture, those mechanisms have to be you know, in fact, you know, working so your hip flex and muscles, even if you're sitting out there, you have to stretch those so that you don't fall into that compensatory dysfunctional support by the body. You want to always get the body to be supporting itself through proper balance left and right, front to back end mobility, because the old adage is if you don't use it, you will lose it, and it doesn't have to be that way again, tall people some of the things that I noticed too, you know, for my daughter, Like you had mentioned earlier, you know, most homes that are built for us there with an average person's height, you know in mind, and so doing the dishes is much more of a challenge for somebody that's you know, six feet or six feet two or six feet three versus someone that's five foot six or five foot four, and so, you know, it's it's difficult how the world around somebody that's on that other side of the spectrum has to interact with something that's not ergonomically you know, set for them. But it just probably puts the onus on people that have more height to be more aware of how can they modify themselves in a world that isn't really constructed as well for them, because it's for. The average person. And it all comes down to trying to make your body as resilient and strong as possible through exercise so that the daily things that might normally have a negative effect on you won't affect you as negatively because you have a mechanism to change that, to keep getting more resilient so that that daily life doesn't you know, beat you down to where you're uncomfortable and you're in pain all the time, because you know that's likely going to happen if you don't take those proactive measures. Yeah, these are all very good points, and that also kind of brings up something else where you were talking about many people believe that strengthening the core can you know, improve your posture and stuff, and this is something that it kind of like brings the idea of like social media, especially TikTok, where they try to promote like this, certain ideas to help a specific problem, and that some of these posts are these videos that are out there that's like giving information relating to this, it's not really taking the whole body into consideration. Because you were also talking about the lower back and the glutes and the hamstrings and all that stuff. So I think it's definitely important to be hearing this from a professional and not just you know, social media and TikTok. And you were also speaking about like doing exercises to strengthen your body and stretching such as like your hip flexers. What are a few basic like stretches and exercises that you would recommend for tall people and all people to help alleviate you know, that strain. So one of the best ways to get and keep the hip flexers loose are lunge type stretches. So if you were to, let's say, set up in a position where you were about to do a push up, you know, with your your toe on your toes, not on your knees, so your body's extended, your hands are on the ground, and then you would simply bring one foot forward and put it right outside your hand, so your one leg is back straight, but the other one is coming forward. And when you lean into that, your hip flexus again, they're on the front of your spine. Threw your pelvis to your hip, so that's going to stretch them. And then you could even. Augment that by on the same side of your legs forward reaching for the for the sky with a rotation too, because rotation is something that a lot of people don't do enough, and it's a movement that if you don't do a lot. But then some task in everyday life, you know, you go bend over and twist a little pick something else, all of a sudden you try to stand up and you can't because the mechanics have not been you know, worked on there. And so with that tension and lack of that. Rotational mobility, a lot of people get hurt that we're just bending over to put on a sock. I can't tell you how many people in the lass almost forty years i've been doing this told me that they went to put their sock on and they went to stand up and they could and they got locked in this position. So it's important to. Keep that, Yeah, that mobility from a rotational and a lateral movement, you know, side to side, because most of us are moving kind of front to back. Most of our task you know, driving, sitting, it's all front to back stuff. There's not enough rotation and lateral movements. So exercises that helped that from both a stretching and a strengthening standpoint are important. But the lunch stretches a really good one for the hip flexers. Now there's another thing that I recommend people do that really have some deep tension in there. If you get a ball like the size of a baseball, a little small and a softball, and you kind of lay on top of it and you lay it right across the one side of your spine in your pelvic area, so you're on the ground on your forearms, that ball is in there when you try to relax your body weight, so you relax your abdominal so that ball goes really deep into the front of your pelvis, and then you simply roll your body over that ball like foam rolling, but now you're using a ball that's actually getting deep, deep, deep into that hip flexer and doing like a foam rolling thing, but it's actually getting in deep where you normally couldn't get to something like that. Doing that on both sides is a really great way to self release that muscle, and the ball makes it a lot smoother because it's going to kind of roll it almost like a massage. And there's actually balls out there that vibrate that you can do that same thing with, which facilitates it a little bit more so. Loosening up the hip flexus and then doing like glute bridges single leg and double leg to really make sure you're firing your glutes, because if your glutes aren't firing because your so as is too tight, your hamstrings are going to start tightening up and working to do what the glutes should be doing. But they're not. And then a low back, muscles tighten up on top of it. So again, these are small little things you could do at home. You don't have to join the gym to do it. Not that I'm not discouraging any up and go on the gym, of course, but these are things that are on a regular basis, especially if you're sitting so much of the day, to really keep those areas mobile, strain and strong and resilient the way they should be. You know. I also kind of want to ask the question too, before we get to the last one up the point of going to the gym, do you think that, like I don't want to say extreme workout, but I would probably say weightlifting, because there's like there's weightlifting and then there's like extreme weightlifting, like people add plates and plates and place onto stuff, especially these like gym tik talkers, and I'm not gonna lie when I see some of those videos, I get a little scared. I just wanted to ads, like, do you think that weightlifting, especially like very heavy weights, that can have like a significant impact on your muscular skeletal system. Yeah. So, unfortunately, when I was younger, I especially when I would go to the gym because I've been working out since I'm ten years old. I actually didn't start going to the gym so I was about nineteen. I did all calisthenics, you know, push ups, pull ups, dips, things that would just body weight exercises, and it really helped probably stave off a lot of the wear and tear I probably would have had if I started lifting weight to that young. However, by the time I was nineteen and I started doing the gym thing, you know, many times throughout my you know, twenties and even my thirties, I would have different guys depending. On where I live, that I would work out with. And you know, when a bunch of got young guys together, you know, we get the egos involved, you know, trying to outdo each other. I definitely lifted a lot more heavier weight than I should have been. Now. I lifted it because I could, but not because I should. And the reason I say that is because now in my sixties, the amount of wear and tear and you know, arthritis and spinal synosis and you know issues with my shoulders and my hips that I have would have been so much less had I not gone that way in that route. Now, for the last probably ten fifteen years, I've been more focused on what I call functional training. Functional training is how you can stay strong and resilient to your daily tasks. So even if you're a i'll say a young mom, all of a sudden, you have a ten fifteen twenty twenty five pound child and you know into two years old that you're carrying around. So I think your functional training needs to be to be able to be stronger in the gym with exercise than what that child carrying them around for the you know for the first two or three years of their life is going to be because that's going to impact you. So it's not about lifting the heavyweights. It's about trying to do the things that are going to keep your body resilient to whatever it has to be doing every day. I think that's really the way people should train. It's not taught that way in the gym is typically, But if you really want exercise to be something you can do for your whole life and continue to do it and make your daily activities much easier for you, then you have to get stronger in the gym at those tasks and those types of movements. So whatever happens in everyday life is not going to have such a negative impact on you. That's what I think about that. Yeah, I think that's honestly really good advice. Not necessarily you know, going to the gym to get bigger or look bigger, but more so so that you're able to complete the tasks that you have to do. So I think that that is really awesome. And you know, that does bring us to our last question. If there's any piece of advice, like, what is one piece of advice that you would like to give to the tall people who are listening right now, who are struggling with physical pains because of their posture or their height. Yes, it's it's going to be somewhat difficult to be able to make one statement if I had to encompass all I would say in one statement I would say is, if you don't understand it yourself, find somebody in nearby that really specializes in functional training and somebody that could understand your particular you know, physical structure and how that needs to be re engineered through exercise to a much more I'll say posturely perfect. But when I'm talking about posturely perfect in terms of about the balance of how you're bearing weight and how all of you is moving, all of you, not just how you're looking standing up straight, Because that type of training is going to be the thing that's going to keep you as you continue to grow or you know, get older, to be able to have a method, a task, something that you can invest in every day that's going to again minimize the chance that you're going to have to have any kind of pain syndrome. And you know, for me, pain is not a lifestyle, but it also is up to us the individual, you know. You know, I say to my patients, look what you do every day in that body that you're walking around in is going to have way more of an impact than anything I could do as a chiropractor or if I'm a trainer. But we all need to become our own. Self care experts of what are my personal needs and how do I, you know, get my life where those things are being addressed. You know, for me, I'm exercising, you know, for thing in the morning and you're superhuman protocol at four am and then five am I. Do it to the gym. But again everything is geared toward keeping my body healthy, strong and resilient and continually moving. In that direction. And so I would say find somebody nearby, or if you look on YouTube about functional training, there might even be some specialties that have the things that could be appropriate for somebody that's a little bit taller. But you have to be dedicated, you have to be the one to initiate it. It's got to come from within, and you just have to be dedicated and say, Okay, this is part of my life. I'm never taking it out. That was really great, and honestly, I wish that we could end on that note because that was such a good, like concluding point. But I also kind of want to just really quickly because this whole episode, this whole time, we've been doing like perfect posture and air quotes, good posture and air quotes, and you know, it's important to like discuss the fact that there is no one set particular type of posture that it's perfect. So I just wanted to know if you can give like a little bit of your two cents on you know, the whole perfect posture and good posture terminology. So I mean one of the things that you can look at from a static standpoint. Again, I said postures dynamic, but in a single moment when somebody's standing. The posture that somebody should have is if you're looking at them from the side and you drew a straight vertical line straight down through their side, that line should go through their ear, their shoulder, their. Hip, their knee, and their ankle. And if in fact there's deviation from that, you can use that as a mechanism to start to say, Okay, my head's coming too far forward from that. That line's not going through my ear properly, So what do you do. I would have you lay face down on your bed and just let your head lay over the edge of your bed and just drop your head straight to the floor and then raise it up towards the sea. That will start to increase the strength of those neck muscles on the back that are responsible for holding your head up straight. And again, with texting and everything else that we're doing with our devices, that posture going with that head forward is being reinforced constantly, so those muscles forward are getting tightened up, so you need to reinforce the ones that pull you in the other direction again, just using the weight of your head as resistance when it comes to your shoulders. If that line's not going through your shoulders properly, and your head and your neck and your head neck and shoulders aren't lining up. Doing things that retract your shoulders with resistance, in other words, pulling back your shoulder blades, backing towards the spine together and also getting them from top to bottom. One of the exercises I go. Most people know what a lot pull down is as a body pull down, and you bring it like this. I tell people do it one at a time because if you bring one side down at a time, you have much more arrange of motion and you can get much more of a complete contraction. So it's not just about having your shoulders back, but they also have to be back and down, so that mechanism of strength is going to keep those shoulders from being rounded forward. So it's shoulder blades back and down. So that's a great way to do it, but I definitely suggest doing it with single arms because you get much more range of motion and better deeper contractions to really get that muscle strong. When it comes to the lower back and you know the torso area. Doing things that combine the movement of the spine and the pelvis. Using the lower back and the glute muscles. There's something called the reverse hyper extension where you're going to be laying over let's say a stability ball on a bench, so you're kind of holding the bench your body, your torso is laying on there, and behind you, you're bringing your legs up straight, contracting at your lower back and your glutes. To bring those legs up. That's really going to have you get those muscles strong that are going to have you standing up straighter. And again, again it's not from the static standpoint, it's more from that fluid and dynamic stamp point, so that all those joints and the way they're holding the weight is going to be well balanced instead of certain areas getting more of your weight bearing because of again poor posture. So those are some of the things that you can do. But using that plumb line, that vertical you know, if you can get someone to take a picture and you draw a straight line, you could start to analyze, okay, this is where I'm off. What do I have to do to get that line to be straight? Even just leaning against the back of the wall, put your head all the way back against the wall, get your shoulders back, get your gluts back, and get your heels back. If you can't do that, do that as a practice to just try to realign your body by getting your muscles to respond to straightening it out. But I mean that's the best I can really do to give somebody some guidance on how they might be able to sort of do that at home. That was really awesome. This is a very informative episode. Like I think this is probably the most I've ever learned relating to like you know how they have health classes and like and high school. I'm pretty sure I learned way more than I ever did in those classes in these past few minutes. So you know, I just made up everything I just told you. Please please please David, where can we find you on the internet? Please let us know. Yeah, so physical evidence dot com is a physical evidence Carropractic dot com. As the website, we have a little button the way you could ask doctor Dave something and people can put their information in with questions and I will. Definitely get back. And I've gotten better and better at like sort of doing something remotely where I can give good insight to somebody, because especially with you know, things like zoom, I could actually take a look at pasture. I can analyze motion of how somebody might be doing, like I say, a squad or things like that, and I can give them a foundation of things to start with. There's some really great exercise bands on Amazon that you can get for the house and do so much with. Again, if you don't have the time or inclination go to the gym, you can for twenty five bucks. I think on Amazon is something. So I recommend that to a lot of people, certainly my patients here, but I've done that with people remotely too, So Physical Evidence Chiropractic dot com on Instagram where Boca Ratone chiropractor and you can DM us there too and always respond and try our best to see if we can help you sort through some of the things that you want to take control but not sure really where to start. Awesome, and those are going to be links below, so it's super easy for everyone. They could just check it out in the description and I'm going to take the time to plug myself at it t All Girls podcast on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest and you know, hit me up, hit David up. Let us know what you thought about this episode. Did you find it informative? Were, they're good tips. Is there anything else that you would want to know, like, feel free to let us know. We're all about the engagement, of course. And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much again, doctor David for joining me today. I really do appreciate all of the information that you gave us. It's my pleasure to share what I can, and with a medium like this, I can reach more people than normally would be walking into my office. So thanks for having me here and having some of the reach that you have that hopefully will bring value to people. Of course, and until next time, I'll catch you guys in the next one. Good night and goodbye.