Two Keys to Athletic Posture and Explosive Performance: Muscle Contractility and Breathing

If you have bad posture, you’ll never reach your true athletic potential.

After making the transition from full-time track coach to full-time strength coach, I have began to pick up some trends that I feel many overlook when they are very focused on either how an athlete performs on the field, or the other direction, which is how much weight they are lifting in the weightroom.

What I’ve found is that athletes with poor posture will have very poor transfer of their weightroom gains to the track, pool, court, or gridiron, relative to athletes with good posture (I’ve been working with swimmers for the last few years, in addition to track athletes).

There is more than one reason for this phenomenon, but it really comes down to three things:

• Reflexive force transmission
• Underactive phasic muscles and overactive tonic muscles
• Positive mental outlook

Posture is important for athletes to be able to utilize reflexive strength and power.  If the trunk, hips and spine are in poor positions during fast athletic movements, the structure of the body won’t be able to absorb and reflect force well.

For example, when an athlete’s foot hits the ground during a sprint, and the hips are in a forward position, and the spine is curved as a result, the forces are transmitted away from the glutes, and towards the hamstrings and low back.  Not only are these muscles not meant to be the primary movers in ground strike, but they also do their job slower than the muscles closer to the center of the body. 

Contrast this with a sprint footstrike when the hips are in a neutral position, the glutes are in position to immediately punch hard, and the force is transmitted up a straighter spine, with less need for excessive muscle activity of spinal and knee stabilizers.  Putting force though properly aligned hips, and a proper spinal alignment is something nearly all athletes at the top of their game accomplish well.

Athletes aren’t doing themselves a favor in barbell activities that can exacerbate their poor postures, particularly a high training volume in lifts that put a premium on anterior pelvic tilt, when that is an issue the athlete has in their dynamic positioning and movement.  Any sort of deep squat or full-catch clean or snatch demands a good amount of pelvic tilt at those critical positions.  For athletes with relatively good dynamic posture, there is no problem using these lifts in a reasonable volume.  For those with poor posture, the focus needs to be on barbell adaptations that improve the quality of phasic muscle firing, and trunk and spine force transmission.  Single leg squats with a focus on proper firing patterns and pelvic positioning are a great remedy for these athletes.  These athletes can still perform deep squats, cleans, and the like (especially to retain the mental and biochemical aspects of barbell training), but the volume should be kept relatively low.

Finally, posture has a huge impact on an athlete’s mental outlook and psychological performance.  Since what is going on in the body has a strong effect on the mind, we know that we can take on the moods of whatever posture we happen to be in.  In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman shares with us that the simple act of forcefully smiling or frowning has a significant impact on our mood.  Try putting your head down, slouching, and frowning for 30 seconds, and tell me what you feel like.  Now stand tall, puff your chest out and smile for 30 seconds and note the difference.  Amazing, isn’t it?

A strong mind is a necessary compliment to a strong, athletic body.

So good posture will help you to maximize your athletic performance, sure, we all figured that was the case.  This isn’t an article dedicated to the weightroom, but rather, on some basic postural corrections outside of a standard barbell training regimen that can make a big difference in performance.   We’ll cover two big solutions to athletic posture here, phasic/tonic muscles, particularly those in the mid-back, and then proper breathing patterning.

Restoring Contractility in Mid-Back, Trunk, and Glutes.  A Key to Proper Posture.

The first, and primary solution to poor posture is to fix contractility and muscle tone in those phasic muscles of the body.  As was mentioned in my previous article on flexibility, “Can Stretching Really Make you a Better Athlete? The Truth Behind Static Stretching and Power Development“, muscles get tight because phasic muscles go weak.  There are some prime weakness culprits when it comes to muscles hurting the posture of an athlete.

• Gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus
• Rhomboids
• Middle and Lower Trapezius, Latissimus Dorsi
• Neck flexors, such as the Sternocliedomastoid or scalenes

It’s pretty easy to see how these muscles going weak can cause problems elsewhere.  When the glutes go weak, the lower back (a tonic muscle group) will go tight, and cause a rounding of the low back.

If the critical muscles of the middle back, such as the rhomboids, lower trapezius, and latissiumus dorsi lose tone and contractility, then the upper and lower back will respond in turn by getting tight so the head can stay upright.   If your levator scapulae is tight, don’t just spend all your time doing therapy on the muscle, but instead, start looking at what the phasic muscles of the mid-back are doing.  Of all the phasic muscles that lose tone, it is those of the mid-back that seem to have the most direct link to an athlete’s posture.

In his book “Applied Kinesiology” Robert Frost (the kinesiology practitioner, not the poet) says that when we have important postural muscles that aren’t firing properly, and we then “force” good posture, all we are doing is firing antagonists and tonic muscles even harder, rather than getting to the root of the problem, which is the contractility of the big phasic muscles.   This “over-contracting” of already tonic muscles can also make it difficult to breathe properly, which we’ll get into in just a short bit.

A huge revelation for me was getting my lats activated at a Douglas Heel conference last February.  My natural, typical posture is a rounding of the mid/upper back, and I usually find myself consciously pulling myself upwards to avoid hunching over.  After I had my lats activated, I stood up and immediately felt lighter and taller.  The audience remarked that my posture had immediately improved and I felt it.  Now that my lats were firing properly, my mid back was pulled into the correct posture without me needing to consciously summon a forced position.  I’ve seen the exact same thing in all the athletes I’ve worked with in lat activation and t-spine reflex points.

Simply forcing posture will only over-activate antagonist muscles.  Activate the lats and muscles of the mid-back for drastic improvements in athletic posture

The ultimate goal of athletics, after all, is to bring about changes in an athlete’s subconscious, isn’t it?  It is the subconscious that brings about the ultimate in athletic performance.   In terms of restoring contractility to these phasic muscle groups that have dropped out, there are plenty of muscle activation and therapy protocols out there, but my favorite is Douglas Heel’s activation system.

Activation aside, if you need to improve the contractility, or firing, of muscles in key points, such as the glutes and low back, specifically targeted low-intensity isometrics can also do the trick to isolate particular muscles without preferential recruitment of everything else.  The video below shows a simple isometric progression to target the mid-back muscle group.

This type of work by itself is extremely simple, and needs to be complimented by isometric hold versions of more traditional exercises, such as a horizontal row, as shown below.   Simply doing traditional up and down reps can cause a lot of cheating or preferential recruitment of other muscles.

Once muscles have the proper contractility, and the proper trunk position is attained, then all work in the weightroom, track and training field starts to “count” more, as it now is working the athlete in the preferred posture and recruitment pattern.  This is another reason that starting the training year out with relatively long isometric holds in things like lunges will pay off dividends later.  As many strength coaches will tell you, build the athletic position first, then do it in volume, then start adding weight.  Unfortunately, we often address training the other way around.

Grinding squats year round by over-recruiting tonic compensators is not a method that will get anyone to world champion status.

If there was a list, or hierarchy of most effective, to least effective methods of strengthening, and improving the contractile nature of those important phasic muscles, particularly in the upper back, the list would generally look something like this (obviously, these can be performed together as well):

Most Useful

• Activation of Zone 1 (breathing, glutes, psoas), followed by a Latissimus Dorsi activation, along with working thoracic reflex points.
• Specific low intensity isometrics of the muscles of the mid-back in conjunction with more integrated, traditional isometric holds such as holding a TRX row at the top of the movement with the scapulas retracted.
• Traditional rowing oriented resistance training for improved mid-back strength
• Thoracic Joint mobilization on a foam roller
• Static stretching tight anterior musculature, such as pec minor (not very effective in most cases, unless these muscles are actually “shortened”. They can be helpful in long hold situations when the actual fascia is tightened due to extreme postural deficiency)

Less Useful (But potentially still effective)

Breathing

Other than fixing muscle firing patterns, another huge key to proper posture is breathing.  The diaphragm is a critical muscle that does a lot of important things, such as pressurize the lower abdominal cavity, and enhance blood flow to the vital organs of digestion, as well as the critically important hip flexor muscles.   Benefits of breathing using a diaphragmatic pattern (belly breathing) include the following:

• Lowers muscle tone in spinal erectors (these are often too tight)
• Improves the functional quality of the psoas and quadratus lumborum due to their fascial link with the diaphragm
• Promotes endorphin release, as well as associated stress relief from up-regulating the parasympathetic portion of the nervous system.
• Helps lymph drainage near the vital organs of the body. Lymph drainage is also associated with muscle activation in an applied kinesiology setting
• Greatly assists in postural improvement
• Helps the athletic body to work from the core, outwards, rather than the other direction.

Although it isn’t really intuitive to link together the way the body is held up with the pattern of the breath, there is an important link.  Ever since I learned Doug Heel’s breathing activation system, as well as the general importance of diaphragmatic breathing, I began to find something interesting in the athletes I worked with.  Athletes with poor posture, without exception, had the natural breathing pattern of chest breathing, rather than diaphragmatic breathing.

Some of the athletes who were extremely posturally deficient took the most work and time to teach them how to actually breathe with their diaphragm.  Once they learned this, their thoracic mobility improved immediately, and dramatically.   It is really hard to breathe properly when you are in a slouched

If you are interested in more on the role of breathing, athletic performance, and how to do a diaphragm activation, check out the article How to Breathe for SAT  by Dr. Tom Nelson, an avid Activation practitioner.

A simple practice that can yield some great athletic, and general health benefits is performing some form of deep diaphragmatic breathing before or after training.  Performing breathing prior to training will help to more fully engage the muscles that share fascial trains with the diaphragm during the workout, and breathing after will help to speed the recovery process.  It also greatly helps posture, especially when done regularly.

Conclusion

 Hopefully through this short article, you have a better idea of why posture is important, and what is, and isn’t so useful in fixing the situation.  It would be nice if simply standing up straight, training your back, and stretching your chest would fix the situation, but unfortunately for many, that isn’t really the case.  True athletic posture is found through proper muscle activation,  re-enforcing the firing of those phasic muscles in athletic positions, and then regularly practicing proper breathing to back it all up.

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