5 Fun Sports to Improve Body Posture

Having a good and ideal body must be a dream for anybody. For men, they may want their body to look more muscular while the women prefer being sexier and shaped well. Regardless of your goals in fitness, you have to keep your body posture to always be upright and firm since this tends to make you look taller and healthier. Fortunately, there are sports that are rich with exercises selection that will definitely improve your body posture. What are they?

Body posture 1: Swimming

If you are currently a swimmer or have good swimming abilities then you are very lucky. It is almost an acceptable truth that swimming is one of the most beneficial sports that you can be involved in. Despite burning calories and shaping muscles, this water-based sport also enables you to have a good body posture as well as increase your height.

When you are swimming with different styles including but not limited to freestyle and breaststroke, all the muscles in your body are forced to move in a particular direction. This way, your body can move easily on the water. This movement will force your muscle into getting stronger. Swimming is one of the best sports to do if you need to burn fat and calories fast.

Swimming is one of the best exercises for improving posture. It helps develop and strengthen your core, back, and shoulder muscles. Aside from this, some studies also show that swimming and other aquatic exercises may help relieve lower back pain. This is because the buoyancy of the water supports your body's weight, reducing the stress experienced by your joints and spine.

Swimming is also a medium for your body to do relaxation. This is how body posture can be improved faster and more effectively. Moreover, swimming is also recommended for your psychological conditions including thinking more positively and enhancing confidence.

Body posture 2: Archery

Archery is an ancient hunting skill that eventually became a sport. It involves using a bow to shoot arrows at an inanimate target. The objective of playing archery is to shoot the target by pulling the bowstring after it’s placed on the back end of the arrow to initiate an input force for the arrow to shoot toward the target. But to achieve this goal, the archer must first execute the proper posture and shooting position.

You may think that this type of sport would not give you any impactful health benefits. After all, archery doesn’t look like very tiring. However, this perception seems to be wrong if you just realized that there are many hidden health benefits from archery. By doing archery for extended periods of time, you automatically train and stretch muscles in the areas of hands and shoulders. There are also some postures/stances that you need to learn so that you can aim better when firing the arrows. When your body is accustomed to doing the postures, your muscles will be permanently following it. This is how your body posture is shaped.

Interestingly, archery also has some other benefits besides the physical. It improves your concentration and focus. That’s why some students with concentration problems in schools are suggested to do this sport. Patience is also another important aspect when you are doing archery.

Archery is considered to be the best sport to improve mental focus. Archers are required to have a level of focus to perform optimally in a competition or even in training. Their brain has to be able to perform in stressful situations.

Body posture 3: Yoga

Recently, Yoga is getting more popular all around the world. Although it is initially a form of meditation conducted as a prayer in some religions, now, it can be done by many people with some modifications. Basically, Yoga is an activity of muscle stretching using certain techniques. It enables your muscles to be stretched more maximally. When you do yoga on a regular basis you will definitely improve your body posture and overall health.

Yoga, like meditation and Pilates, helps you become more aware of your body, from your feet, legs, core, and abdomen, to your arms, chest, shoulders, back, and head. The different yoga poses enable you to increase your body’s flexibility and strength to improve your posture over time. For example, the sitting and standing yoga poses can help establish and maintain a powerful core.

When you are doing Yoga, your body needs to stay in certain positions for a specific amount of time. This is how Yoga is able to improve your body posture. Yoga is also one of few sports that is known to increase your height. But the main benefits of yoga is to help your muscles in recovery and prevent muscle tightness. Yoga is known to be added to top athletes exercise regimes from almost all sports fields. Golfers use yoga to stretch and recover after a game, and basketball players do yoga to recover from a hard match/training.

Overall if you have not tried yoga then you are missing out. You will experience an improvement in both your physical and mental health just by trying yoga for a few sessions. You will not be disappointed.

Body posture 4: Pilates

Pilates is a sport that enables you to stretch the entire of your body at the same time. To do this activity, you need to use a fitness ball. The ball needs to be big and suitable to be used for Pilates. Pilates is quite similar to Yoga. However, both are different from each other and they are even not related to at all. As information, Pilates is developed by a doctor from Germany.

When the exercises in Pilates are done properly, your body can greatly benefit from it. They are including but not limited to; better respiratory system, burning fat more effectively, improve strength and flexibility, and repair bad body posture. Sure, in case your body posture has been good, it can be much improved. It is reasonable if this exercise is highly recommended for you who want to continue your study in the area of military and sport.

But no matter how good Pilates is, there is one requirement that you have to fulfil when doing Pilates. You have to be accompanied by a professional Pilates instructor. Any wrong movements while doing Pilates could result in serious injury especially to your back muscles.

Body posture 5: TRX

This sport is very new and is not commonly known by many people. In short, TRX is the development of the rope sport that was invented around the 1800s. Then, Randy Hetrick, a veteran of navy developed it in the’90s. Then, the sport was introduced to people openly in 2005.

TRX stands for Total Body Resistance Exercise. It consisted of bodyweight exercises that are combined with the use of rubber bands or ropes as an added resistance. Some sample movements that can be done through the use of ropes are jump squats, single-leg lunges, push up, and many more. Using the rubber band, it is expected that the movements can be done more optimally. It is proven by the fact that you can burn calories of 350-550. Sure, it depends on your performance.

The movements you will be doing in TRX also enables you to improve your body posture. Movements such as the bodyweight squats are already known as an exercise to improve upright body posture. Combining the squat with rubber bands will greatly amplify the health benefits of doing TRX.

Conclusions

Asides from having a good body-mass ratio relative to your height. A firm and flexible body posture is another important thing that you should strive to achieve. As we can see from the list above you can choose which one that is the most suitable for you. You can achieve better body posture by doing any of these 5 sports to improve posture

Author Bio

John Ananto is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Blue Belt currently living in Indonesia. He is currently working as a personal trainer and freelance writer. In his free time, he likes to play computer games, writing on his blog Fight Four Health and enjoying time with his family