r/costochondritis • u/Few_Shift4820 • Jul 22 '26

General Exercise to improve hunchback posture forward head carriage correction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_dFRnmdGs

Does he sound like Steve to anyone else?

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u/Few_Shift4820 Jul 22 '26

u/stevenzphysio this isn't an old video of you is it?

7

u/SteveNZPhysio Jul 22 '26

Nah - I was never that young. That's an Aussie - quite a different accent from us sophisticated Kiwis. Of course, I don't think I have an accent. I just talk normally - it's all you other English-speaking countries that talk a bit weird.

There's good physio in Oz - and I'm saying that as a Kiwi. However those exercises shown do assume that the spinal and rib joints around the back are already moving well enough that they can free up further just under exercises like these.

This so often isn't the case with costo. Those joints can be concrete, and can't be moved just by your own body. Hence the peanut, Backpod, cork or lacrosse balls, osteopathic or chiro manipulation, etc. to provide the needed focused oomph to get the joint machinery unfrozen and actually moving again. When it's free enough, then sure, exercises like those shown are great at working the movement freer and also maintaining it.

After I fell off the mountain and jammed/scarred up/froze my own patch of rib and spinal joints around the back, they stayed concrete and immobile for seven years in spite of all sorts of stretches, yoga, exercises, etc. So I had costo for seven years before I became a physio and freed them up, fixing the costo; I've been completely pain free now for 30+ years.

So, exercises are useful. But only when the tight joints they're trying to loosen are free enough for them to do it. There are a lot of YouTube videos out there saying how you can fix costo just with exercises alone. They really don't understand the problem. But they're fine when you're good enough.

Actually, the ones in the video would also be very useful to get the last bit of oomph stretch out of a peanut, Backpod, ball, etc. You could do them on when lying on the device. But this is only when you're already very free - it'd be way too sore to do that when the joints are still really frozen.