Stretching to Fix YOUR posture: correcting for rounded shoulders

Ever wonder why your shoulder or neck hurts when you reach overhead or while you’re lifting weights? Chances are good that posture is a contributing factor. One of the most common postures I see across age groups is where the shoulders (where the upper arm meets the collar bone and shoulder blade) are slightly rotated in. This happens often for 3 main reasons. 1) some muscles are long and weak 2) some muscles are short and/or stiff 3) You habits feeding into the above.

So we know that this can be an issue, the next question is “how can I fix this?”

Check out my video below where I target the flexibility portion of this question.

stretching to fix rounded shoulders

If you think you might have poor posture, you may find a prevous post helpful as well which addresses Forward Head Posture .

I hope this is helpful.

Best,

Nicole Mims. PT, DPT.

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Stretches to fix YOUR posture. – correcting ‘forward head’

As I discussed in a post a while back, its important to stretch muscles that are short or stiff on you, not just what you learned in high school gym class or what feels “tight.” Often muscles which give the sensation of feeling tight are actually overstretched already.

So how do you decide what to stretch? In PT we often do special tests in order to confirm our suspicions; however, without doing this one can still get a good idea of what they need to do based off of posture.

Here are some common postures and their corresponding muscle groups which tend to be short/stiff.

Next post will be a video specifically on what to stretch to address “forward head” posture.

Forward head

Short/stiff: SCM & Scalenes

Weak/elongated: Deep neck flexors

 

 

Rounded Shoulders

Short/stiff: Pectoralis minor, shoulder external rotators

Weak/elongated: Middle/lower traps. Internal rotators of the shoulder.

 

Rounded Upper Back

Short/stiff: pectoralis major and minor, lats

Weak/elongated: Traps, Rhomboids

 

Increased curve of low back

Short/stiff: spinal extenders (erector spinae), hip flexors

Weak/elongated: abdominals, glutes

 

Anterior Pelvic Tilt:

Short/stiff: hip flexors, hamstrings

Weak/elongated: glutes, abdominals

 

Feet turned out:

Short/stiff: gastrocnemius, soles, posterior tib (muscles that point the toe)

Elongated/weak: anterior tibialis, toe flexors

 

 

Now that we know which muscles we need to target, we’ll dive into HOW to actually do this.

Please check out my next post where I discuss how to stretch the muscles which are short and contribute to bad neck posture.

With love,

Dr. Mims

 

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