Transcription
Have you been told or given the impression that you have weak upper back muscles that help pull your shoulders back? And in order to fix your shoulder posture and pain, you need to strengthen these muscles? Here's what that perspective misses and what to do instead.
See, it's not that these muscles are inherently weak. It's just that positionally they're not able to do their job properly due to the starting conditions. When the shoulders are forward like this and pulled away from the rib cage, we typically have a depressed sternum like this. This rounds the shoulders forward into a position of internal rotation. But this is happening because primarily of tightness on the front side of the rib cage creating a down position of these front ribs which creates a situation where the shoulders are being pulled forward. So we can strengthen these muscles back here as much as we want. But unless we're addressing the ability to also open up the front side of the rib cage, we're always going to be limited in the amount of success that we can have.
So an exercise that's a genuine fix has to have two main things. First, the sternum needs to remain in an up position, allowing for the front of the rib cage to remain in an open, expanded position. Secondly, what we need is to align the resistance with the fibers that we're trying to target of these specific upper back muscles. And we can do that a couple of different ways depending on whether we're targeting the mid traps or the romboids.
If we're targeting the romboids, it's important to appreciate that these muscles help, yes, pull the shoulder back closer to the spine, but they also help pull the shoulder up at the same time. So, an exercise that optimally targets these muscle fibers of the rhomboid has to allow for a natural arm path that brings the scapula up and back at the same time. But also, we can't forget we need to keep the front of the rib cage open. So, this single arm cable bent over row with a relatively wider arm path will allow for the shoulder blade to naturally come back and up at the same time without us risking too much upper trap taking over, but also allowing for the front rib cage to remain in an open position as we breathe through this exercise.
A good exercise that targets the mid traps is something that's going to have a relatively more parallel arm path because that is going to allow for the scapula to be pulled closer to the spine without it excessively shrugging up or being pulled down because the mid traps mostly just pull the shoulder blade back on the rib cage like this without creating a lot of elevation or depression. A traditional face pull exercise can be a really effective solution for this, but in a specific way where we're seated, providing ourselves external support and stability. Because traditionally in a face pull, we don't have that. And that's just creating a balancing act where we're having to overcome the ability to not be pulled forward. But this helps circumvent that while still providing for a nice arm path that allows for us to target those middle traps.