Are you looking for an easy way to fix your hunched over posture?
Rounded shoulders and text neck are very common in a world in which we spend a large part of our day seated in front of a screen. This can not only lead to problems with your back but also make you self-conscious about your posture.
Luckily, you are not destined to suffer from poor posture but are able to address these issues and reverse the effects. But is hanging really the solution for a stronger posture? Is it the “easy posture fix” that the internet promises?
In this post, you will learn which postural issues hanging can solve and where it doesn’t live up to the hype. Finally, we’ll give you some tips on how to incorporate the exercise into your routine.
Table of Contents
Dead Hangs Help with Rounded Shoulders
When you think of bad posture, you think about a hunched upper back with the shoulders rolled forward. The cause of that is habitual in the beginning but it leads to muscular imbalances over time. Simply “standing up straight” won’t help because the musculature can’t hold the position.
Hanging Improves Shoulder Mobility
When you grab a pull-up bar and hold on with your arms fully straightened, you are in a rare position. Think about it: How often do you raise your arms overhead in daily life? Hanging re-introduces your shoulders to full overhead range of motion.
Especially if you perform a passive hang, meaning you relax your shoulders and let your body sink down, you will feel an intense stretch.
The dead hang mainly stretches your latissimus and pectoral muscles, but you might also feel it in your biceps, triceps, deltoids, or other muscles.
Tight shoulder muscles are one of the many contributors to poor posture. Especially tight chest muscles contribute to this rounded position by pulling your shoulders forward. Improving shoulder mobility and loosening the pectorals are a step in the right direction.
Hanging Trains Shoulder Stability
Mobilizing and stretching is not enough to improve your posture. It is crucial to strengthen and activate weak muscles that you don’t use enough in everyday life and probably overlook in your workout routine.
While the passive hang is very effective at stretching out the muscles around your shoulders, the active hang is good at activating them, especially the ones in your back. The latissimus, lower trapezius, and rhomboids are firing during the active hang and work to stabilize your shoulders and shoulder blades.
Moreover, your rotator cuff muscles work to stabilize the head of the humerus in the shoulder socket.
This stability exercise prepares your shoulders for everyday life and trains you to maintain a solid shoulder position.
The Dead Hang Increases Core Strength
Active hanging is also excellent for improving core strength. A strong core is essential to stabilize your spine and maintain a strong posture in daily activities. Without a strong core, you will not be able to keep your spine neutral while carrying heavy objects or performing athletic movements.
To ensure that your core is engaged, you have to hang from the bar with a hollow body position. By pointing your toes and slightly elevating your feet in front of you, your core is activated and trained to stabilize your body.
Why Dead Hangs for Posture Aren’t Enough
Hanging Only Trains the Upper Body
While the hanging exercise has numerous benefits for posture improvement, there are even more problems that it doesn’t address. Your posture is influenced by muscles throughout your whole body. Therefore, a single exercise will never be able to address all the problem areas you need to work on.
First of all, it is an upper body exercise. Often, postural issues start at the legs or even the feet. Weak hamstrings and glutes, compared to stronger quads, lead to a suboptimal pelvic position. A tilted or unstable position of the pelvis leads to an overly arched lower back. Your body compensates by rounding the upper back more.
If you only address your upper body — and your shoulders specifically — you will not be able to solve the problem. That’s like fixing the roof of a house with cracks in the foundation.
Dead Hangs Don’t Strengthen the Neck
The hanging exercise does not train your neck at all. Whether you perform a passive or an active hang, your neck doesn’t need to work.
The neck is often neglected in strength training but plays a crucial role. Your head weighs roughly ten pounds and your neck muscles have to carry that weight all day. But how often do you train your neck?
If you suffer from forward head posture, your neck muscles are lacking the strength to keep your head leveled over your body.
To address your neck strength, you have to specifically train it.
Dead Hangs Are Static
As the name implies, the dead hang is a static exercise. Posture, on the other hand, is not about being static but about maintaining alignment in dynamic movements.
You need to incorporate compound movements into your training program that teach you to maintain a neutral spine while lifting heavy loads. This builds not only the muscular capacity to maintain a strong posture but also the mental awareness of moving efficiently.
Moreover, your shoulders need to be trained in more dynamic ways. While the dead hang is excellent at improving shoulder range of motion and stability straight overhead, your shoulders need to be stable and mobile in every position.
Limited Muscle Engagement
Because hanging from a bar is static, the muscles targeted during the active hang are not challenged enough to drive a lot change. Hanging is most challenging for your hands and forearms.
The strength that is required of your shoulders, back, and core is not enough to drive meaningful improvement over a longer period of time.
How to Incorporate Dead Hangs into Your Routine for Posture Improvement
All in all, the dead hang is a solid exercise for improving posture. If done consistently over a long time in combination with other exercises, it can bring meaningful changes. Although hanging is a tool for shoulder mobility as well as stability and strength, it is stronger at working on the mobility aspect.
If you want to incorporate the exercise into your routine, you should focus on what you need to work on more. The passive hang is ideal to train your shoulder mobility and stretch your chest and latissimus. The active hang focuses more on shoulder and core stability.
In our free program dedicated to posture improvement, we utilize a variation of passive hanging: the one-armed hang. This variation allows for an even stronger stretch in your pecs and lats. The program contains a lot of strength exercises for the shoulders, back, and core that are superior to the dead hang. Therefore, a hanging variation targeting mobility is more valuable in that context.
Generally, the active hang serves as a great warm-up exercise. It activates the back of your shoulders and gets the muscles responsible for stabilizing your shoulders ready for action.
The passive hang, on the other hand, is best done at the end of your workout because passive stretching beforehand can negatively affect your performance.
Switching between passive and active hanging from workout to workout or doing both allows you to reap the mobility, stability, and strength benefits.
As a beginner to the hanging exercise, start by doing three sets of 10 to 30 second holds. Progress the duration of the holds as you get stronger. You can use lifting straps if your grips fatigue too fast. After all, the primary goal of the exercise is to improve shoulder mobility and enhance core and shoulder strength.
Although hanging sounds like a very simple exercise, there are a lot of different variations and tricks you can utilize. Our ultimate dead hang guide covers everything you need to know and offers you some extra tips.
