Fix your shoulders
Right now as you’re reading this, I wonder if you could pause and check your shoulders. Are they hunched forward? If so, just take a moment to push them back and readjust yourself with your chest out. Okay now let’s begin.
In my line of work, I pay attention to people’s posture. I notice their shoulders and backs and I also get to tell them how to adjust them properly for longevity. This is a little like telling someone to eat more vegetables: if they believe it’s important, they are probably already doing it. If they don’t, they are unlikely to start just because I am telling them to. The only way we will start getting into better posture is if it becomes a daily habit, like eating our veg, brushing our teeth, and so on.
How we got here
We know that surviving modern life doesn’t require a perfectly good upright posture, it requires a lot of sitting and a lot of brain power, concentration and resistance to distractions.
So in the absence of the need to work, our shoulders typically find a position they can relax in, so that our brain can concentrate without having to focus on our shoulder position.
Modern life also doesn’t need us to put our arms over our head a lot. If the body doesn’t need an extended range of motion, it doesn’t spend energy and resources maintaining it. So if we don’t use it, we end up losing the ability to put our arms overhead.
Training and lifestyle play a key part here. If you’ve been swimming or doing gymnastics or weightlifting, chances are your shoulders are very mobile and you can easily pull them back and down. For the rest of us, we need a way to reintroduce shoulder strength and mobility to our lifestyle.
Chronic stress
I often hear ‘I carry tension in my shoulders’. This is true for many of us, but the frequency of the stress and how often you relieve it matters.
If you are someone who is constantly highly stressed and short on recovery, you are likely to be constantly tight.
It will be hard to stop the muscular tightness until you address the underlying emotional tension: get a little more aware of your emotional tension and relieve it regularly before it become a postural issue.
Test your shoulder range
After all this, you’re wondering ‘how challenging can it be to hold my arms overhead’? Let’s find out with the Wall Angel drill.
Sit down on the floor with your back right up against a wall. Make sure that your low back is touching the wall. Now with your whole spine against the wall, bring your arms to the sides, bent at the shoulders in a W shape, and make sure your elbows and wrists also touch the wall. Slowly take your arms to a fully locked out overhead position, with your biceps by your ears. Make sure your back is still touching the wall. Slowly bring your arms back down to the W position. Repeat and make sure your low back, elbows and wrists do not leave the wall. Watch the video below and follow along:
Was this hard? It depends on your mobility and each one of us is different in this area. The extent to which this was hard will give you an idea of how much you need to pay attention to your shoulders. If you found it really difficult, read on.
What to do now
‘Use it or lose it’ is a good rule of thumb when it comes to physical ability. To maintain your posture, you need to practice good posture and the best way to do that is through movement and training. Here are three types of movement you should be doing:
Train your range of motion
Training your shoulder range of motion also involves your lats, chest and shoulder blades. There are many ways to do this, below are some suggestions for passive and active flexibility training.
Hanging
Hanging from a bar lets gravity pull your shoulders into a fully open position. This is how to hang passively, which is the simplest type of hanging. Bear in mind if this is too much, you can always rest your feet on the ground or a stool.
One simple way to reintroduce hanging to your life is to join my Hanging Challenge starting Monday 24th May. We will practise a little bit of hanging every day for 30 days. If you don’t have a hanging habit in your life, there is nothing better I can recommend right now.
Overhead holds
Holding a weight with active shoulders (pushing the weight upwards) as in a handstand. You can do this with any heavy object, or with one object in each arm.
The point here is to keep the rest of your body straight and avoid arching your low back to compensate for a lack of shoulder range. If this is too hard, use one arm at a time:
Where you can start
If this is all a bit much to do alone, I fully understand because I have been there. I went to every class I could find and I also trained alone which I am still doing daily. I have now created the class that I needed all along.
At Strong & Bendy we train full-body mobility each Monday, Wednesday and Friday and I would love you to join me.