Shoulder Mobility Stretches to Improve Posture and Flexibility
To watch the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/vasAqig0xGw
What’s happening y’all welcome back. My name is CJ Kobliska, Director of programming here at Gymnazo. And today I want to offer you a few tips and tricks that we use for shoulder most ability, mobility and stability combined, rather flexibility and strength for our shoulders, we need to realize that strength isn’t just about how much you can press overhead, how much you can curl it, how much you can fly, how much you can benchpress, or this, that and the other of all loaded motions, it’s starting with the access and availability that your shoulders innately have, that depending on our lifestyle that may inhibit, where we can access our range of motion. And the more time we spend on this earth, the more we fall into the attractor wells, typically into this kyphotic state, and even more so into kind of a functional scoliosis. Or we fall into a certain pattern or a certain path that a body likes to just sit into. Think about how you sit at a desk or how you drive or how you write stuff down or how you talk on the phone. Depending on where we hold ourselves most often throughout our days is where our body is going to fall into. So these motions are going to be safe for you. It’s just a matter of finding your threshold, move them slowly go through them gently and invite more opportunity for your soldiers to move rather than forcing them through motions that they cannot quite go through. Right now, over time of practicing a lot of these different skills and drills, your soldiers actually have quite a bit more access, they’ll be able to move up and down with ease to tilt right and left with ease and to rotate to protract and retract to essentially access the full 360 degree sphere that were born within these big suckers right here. A lot of times we end up over utilizing our deltoid and our traps. And we end up getting a lot of discomfort tissue that needs to be massaged or kind of opened up or readjusted by a chiropractor or massage therapist often. And those things aren’t bad working with chiropractors and working with a massage therapist. Fantastic. Well, we need to realize is if we’re not intentionally moving our body, through our shoulders, through our hands, through our thoracic spine and through our hips, what will happen over time is if we don’t use it, we’re going to lose it. So if we don’t use these tissues together, we’re going to lose the ability to but the great thing is you can reinvigorate that motion re access that availability as long as you start exposing yourself to it once again. So let’s start with something simple, just some shoulder rolls. I’ll just start with fists together and then naturally, they’ll start to come apart, but let the fists stay together. And I want you to think about moving forward in a canoe or a kayak, you’re paddling forward just kind of rolling in a figure eight. Now you might initially try to just use your elbows, that’s perfectly fine. But I want you to think about allowing your elbow to steer your thoracic spine or your elbow to drive your shoulder to drive your core to drive your spine and your hips through this natural figure eight movement. And with this typically about 30 seconds is great, we’re not going to do too much time with it. But I encourage you to revisit this after watching the video. And I want you to reverse it. Let’s take it to have backwards movement or backstroke. Kind of like a softball pitch on the underneath or bowling kind of motion through your body or moving backwards and a canoe and kayak on the water. Just kind of paddle yourself back and allow yourself to move freely. If you’re giving yourself cues to stay stiff through your spine stay neutral. Realize that our hips, our spine and our shoulders are very mobile tissues that are designed to move 360 degrees in space, or essentially move through all three planes of motion. Now that we’ve got our figure eights, or should think about just isolating this to one side. So let’s go with your right hand at your heart left handed your hip, we’re going to focus on this right elbow. And I want you to go for an overhand roll from the side view looks like so roll it over the top. Thinking about how the elbow drags your shoulder drives your thoracic spine or that mid back where you get tall, get short, get tall, get short, and then reverse it, take it backwards. Keeping the hands on your chest allows you to keep your spine moving without the hand on your chest, you can get away with just your elbow. So let your hands stay glued in where you feel your whole body flowing with it and see if you can put less effort in but still continue that full range of motion. Now let’s do the same thing on the side. Left hand chest right hand on your hip. And let’s go for those four roles. And it’s a great way to just assess how one side compares to the other. I know with my left side I’m a bit more limited as the shoulder I had surgery on and I was told that I couldn’t use it to do all the dynamic fun things like climbing like throwing without pain and I said hell no let’s figure out a way to move this sucker and it wasn’t just through isolate Question, our motions, it was through articulating this movement through the thoracic spine, through our ribcage and through our hips, it’s gonna same thing backwards. So if you think you’ve got a bad side or a good side, or you think you’ve got one side that just never really worked for you think differently think we just haven’t found the right movements to unlock that shoulders capacity and availability, for movement and for training. So those the easy ones should start to be like it’s warming up the shoulders a little bit, just doing that can be so powerful and effective. Because if you’re locked into a computer, you’re traveling, you’re in an airport, you’re a student, whatever the case is, and you’re locked in, and you find yourself in this kyphotic position, that handling your chest will help to roll you out of that kyphotic isn’t bad, unless you’re stuck in that roll forward, flex forward. Same thing, if you’re stuck in extension, you’re just going to have different issues, different dysfunctions arise. So the tougher part, where do you go back two fists together, and we’re going to alternate, I want you to go right over the top, then left, backwards, right over, left, backwards, right over, left backwards and try to maximize the height of your circle or that range of your circle over with the right under with your left. And it’s okay, if you start to get a little uncoordinated with this, start to lose track. Just come back, think right over, left under, we’re bringing our brain back into our body. Now we know our brain is inside of our body, but it may not be communicating with the parts of our body. This is that process of reintegration. Now see if you can do that at the same time. So right is going over left is under and this took me a while to get you might get it right off the bat. But give yourself time, be slow, be gentle. And you can always come back to that step where it was one under, ride over, see if you can get them going at the same time. Right over left under this takes a lot of focus. So let you think for a little bit, right over left under. As you start to find this motion, you’re gonna find how your thoracic spine kind of rolls in a circle. And this is going to allow you to access a little bit more freedom in your shoulders, but also just bring in some great blood flow and some stimulation to the nerves in your shoulder tissues. Now it’s switched directions who shake it out a little bit, give yourself some time, left is going to go over right is going to go under. So we’ll come back to this together, left over right under left over right under and allow yourself again, to move your entire body, we get our shoulders to move. And we get our rest of our body to move. Now when you go to throw a ball, reach for something, swing something just move something from point A to point B, we know that our shoulders have friends to help out It’s especially helpful when you’re moving stuff heavy objects and your arms and you just want to stretch it out. See if you can now alternate or at the same time, but change the direction so left is over right is under left over right under. And notice just check in if your body starts to switch directions, left over, right under left over right under. And how’s the phone it’s this sort of make it bring a smile to your face a little bit, you might get a little discombobulated just come right back left over right under and then try to give it the same time.
Go ahead and shake that out a little bit. So as we call our shoulder roll series, forward, backward, alternate and then same time going opposite directions. If you want to add one more in there kind of a simple one is both can go forward. And both can go back you might recognize that as like shoulder roles that we tend to do but just by taking the arms out it isolates the arms. If we could take the elbows and push them out and go to this role. Now we start to get some deep flexion and some deep extension through our thoracic spine in reference to our shoulder blades moving through those motions. So your shoulder blades will kind of move with your elbows, imagine my hands as your shoulder blades. As you lift your right elbow up, your shoulder blade will tilt that same way kind of in towards your spine from the top, left elbow lifts, same kind of thing. You reach your hand up, the shoulder blade should elevate reach your hand down, the shoulder blade should depress a little bit, you reach your hand around to the left shoulder blade should come around and you open your hand up the shoulder blade comes back. So all of those are great motions to also just integrate into your shoulder mobility. That’s something we got to do from here is globalize this that’s kind of isolated to just this upper area you And then to kind of get a little bit of motion through your hips, we’ve also got to think about how your arms might be swinging in space or moving further away from you. So this next one is called our spherical swing matrix. We’re going to go through our entire sphere, imagine this giant bubble around you. And you want to reach your fingertips to touch the bubble, where to do it up and down. We’re going to do it side to side and we’re gonna do it rotationally. And I want you to imagine your fingertips tracing the inside of your bubble. So here we go. We’re going to start up and down, hands on your thumbs up, we’re going to sweep down and sweep up and reach your fingertips away with your arms are straight the whole time. And allow yourself to extend as you come up and to flex as you come down, chin to chest, chin to sky and you want to go to where your arms stay straight, not where you’re bailing. And now putting stress now through your neck and shoulders, and the frontal plane, we’re gonna go with one hand, souping up over the top, other hand souping underneath. So it gets some good lateral bending of length on one side, shortness on the other. Think about lengthening rather than just falling and compressing the spine. So lift as the head comes higher over the top, keeping in mind that the way your hands move is also what your shoulder blades will be doing. So if you have frozen shoulder, we might need to shorten this a little bit, keep a little bit smaller circle, but it feels pretty good. Go a little bit deeper with that motion, hips slide. And then we’ll take it into rotation. Now we’re going to take our left palm out in front palm down, right palm up back in behind. And we’re going to switch the hands. I want you to always look towards your backhand though. So it allows your spine to rotate. So you’ll take your right hand to front palm down, left hand opens, follow that backhand and then replace, follow and replace back and forth and not towards strains. But certainly where you feel your body kind of naturally stopped you, the faster you swing, the more potential for discomfort because your body may not be exposed to this rotation enough to know to use the packs to know to use your core muscles to know to use your hips to get there and may just isolate all into your deltoid and your trap. So something to pay attention to if any of those did bother was it more of a tissue discomfort between your joints, or was it in a joint that bothered your elbow, your shoulder, your neck, your mid back, even your low back down into your hips? Did you experience any discomfort with those, if you did, the motion isn’t bad for you, we made sure to find a better range of motion or a slower pace with those motions, and both sides may be different. So this next one is going to be a single arm spherical matrix swing, you’re going to have a lot more access because the other side isn’t going to be inhibiting the tension of the other side. So we go left handed hip, right hand super low, super high. Something if you’re sitting at a desk for a while, you know, shoulders are stiffening up being in one position for quite some time. This could be your saving grace, as simple as this, you just every time you spend a couple of minutes. Now you don’t need that adjustment every single week for the same exact discomfort. Now same hand underneath and over the top left the hips slide, make sure it’s not just the arm moving by itself, but you’re getting the hips and nice curve through your entire body. It takes practice I get to do this daily multiple times a day for years. You shouldn’t see me years ago, did not look less fluid. Same hand, take a palm down in front, we’re going to rotate palm up, back and behind, palm down, let your hips turn, even let your foot pivot and recognize Holy crap. Look at all that extra access to rotation that you didn’t think you had. We’re utilizing our foot in our hip. Now, to gift our shoulder more motion. We’re not emphasizing more, more mobility in the shoulder, more mobility in the shoulder. What we’re saying is let’s think about the friends that helped the shoulder out and it’s down to the feet and it’s all the way through our head. So same thing left hand with the right hand on your hip, swing low and swing high, all the way up, all the way down. Let the hips shift back as you swing low, reaching behind your chin to chest and then hips. Extend hand goes high. We’ll take it in the frontal plane and palm faces forward, up and over the top. As always go a little less range in the beginning and then gradually invite more range as you feel more comfortable. What we should be feeling here is some tension lifting to this ribcage, not compression in the side. If we feel compression, it’s not wrong. But again, it’s feedback that we use as coaches as MDMC. Coaches to assess how we can make your motion more fluid and more efficient so you’re not over stressing certain tissues. Now you got rotations palm down, across, palm up, open up. Remember, you have a foot that can pick Have it from the opposite side, if you’re turning left, the right foot is going to give to you, gosh, look at how many extra degrees I get. In that twist. If I stop here, I might think my shoulder is limited. But it might be because my chest stopped moving, we need to turn the chest, and then maybe even get that foot to turn to gift our shoulder and remind our children body how much rotation ability, it actually has, when we utilize every part can we’ve been taught isolation, isolation and strict movement patterns. But in function, it’s very dynamic and fluid, we have to train that way in order to integrate that into our real life. So there’s just spherical reach matrix, both hands, and a single arm. One more point we want to add into this, which we kind of addressed was your hips, I want you to try this out, reach your right hand as high as possible, like lift to the sky. And then once you step your left foot forward and right foot back, and keep reaching your right hand as high as possible. And notice if you get shoulder discomfort, or if you feel tension through your hip and core, if we manipulate our position just right, and can shift our awareness to where our pressures going, which is our front foot, our back, forefoot, and our hip pushing forward. And now reach, what we may find is that our shoulder isn’t doing too much of this work, it’s actually the tension through our hip and core that allow that hand to go overhead. What I find so often with people who have issues reaching up overhead and pain is that their shoulder actually has quite a bit of access. It’s got availability in different ranges of motion, and even overhead. But as soon as we ask them to extend their hip and reach overhead, they’re almost to collapse. And what we found is that, because this anterior tissue doesn’t just stop here, it’s not just a hip, not just a core, not just the chest. But it’s a continuum of chain of tissue of fascial tissue that’s communicating to your brain where your body’s at in space, if we can lengthen all this and create more access. Now, this arm isn’t playing tug of war with the front of your body, we unlock that fascial line. And now, oh, there’s freedom overhead. And it was never the shoulder that was at fault. It was just the shoulder that was trying to do the work for what the core wasn’t doing. And you did the same thing in all of our lateral motions, if you refer to some of our other videos might find a spherical reach. What we’re really doing here is teaching our body and reminding our body, how to utilize every single joint in all three planes of motion to create a transformational zone of loading and exploding. Everything we do in real life has some kind of load and explode. And the most that we do is walk. And if we’re not loading and exploding efficiently, through our core, through our hips, down through our feet, and all the way out through our fingers, something in that chain or something in those joints is going to end up locking up over time. And what we find is throughout the years to reach in our 50s 60s and 70s, you may be more at risk for discomfort and pains. But it may not be because of just aging. It may be because of lack of movement. Over those past few years, maybe few decades that you haven’t really branched out like you were reaching as a kid and just out free flowing. You’ve closed yourself down and locked away. The great news is you can come back out of this, you can feel more free, you can gain more access not only into your shoulders, but into your whole thoracic spine, relieving back pain into your hips, relieving hip impingement, and knee pain and even strengthening down through the arches of your feet and all three planes of movement to strengthen your arches if they’re collapsed or they’re super high, not just putting in our support, but allowing our body to integrate more movement patterns
that are not only effective, but they’re efficient. And they’re three dimensionalized and they’re fun, they’re functional, they’re intentional for what you’re doing in everyday life. So if you found this video interesting it found it helpful. Feel free to leave a comment we’ll get back to you or even check out our other videos that go in deeper into ankle go into hips, spine, this that the other we go deep into the biomechanics and unlocking the real freedom through your movement. Enjoy.
Leave a Reply