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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About the Author:

This is NOT one of “those sites” where the author gives advice without evidence or confuses their opinions with fact. My name is Nicole Mims. I am a Physical Therapist living in Austin Texas. I was an RRCA certified running coach and a NASM certified Personal Trainer before going to school for my Doctorate in PT. I plan to discuss health and wellness with a holistic perspective. My life and education have equipped me to do this. I believe that people should have access to evidence based information to better their lives. In my effort to give back, this site is free and non ad driven.

I walk many different paths in my day to day. I’m an avid gym goer, PT, artist, advocate for sobriety, dog mom, lay buddhist, and often simply a human with all the related strengths and foibles. Advice here will be fact based with resources, but it will also be a sounding board for what I’ve found to be true in my life. Some articles are just personal expression of feelings that need a way out (located under personal). Hopefully we’ll both find something we can use here.

With love,

Nick

Giving of yourself when you have nothing left. (my recent challenge as a health professional)

This is definitely one for the personal column.

I recently went through a loss (which I don’t have the distance from to discuss yet.)  What I will say is that by the time I got to work yesterday, I felt like I had absolutely nothing in the tank. I literally began the day wondering how I was going to manage to get out of bed.  I’d had about 3 hours of sleep, no food, and had been crying for so long it looked like I was trying to throwback to my teenage years, when red eye shadow was an acceptable  a thing.

Dame fate has a cruel streak as this was also one of those days where there were endless fires to put out, and my patients needed everything I would have had on a good day.

Being a patient in general is a scary experience and it is crucial that they feel like they can be vulnerable with you, that you won’t judge them, and that you actually care.  To quote one of my favorite Buddhist speakers Ajahn Brahm: “you must be a dust bin with a hole in the bottom.”  One should be able to listen to concerns and help or advise without holding on to how this affects them personally. This takes a balanced mind, discipline, and patience. If ever there was a day this was not it…

And yet there they were.   One person had a breakdown within 5 minutes of arriving.  An evaluation came in with red flags for a severe nerve problem termed Cauda Equina Syndrome that had somehow been missed by her primary care doctor and VA doctor.  Another person twisted their newly surgically repaired ankle… and so on.

As the day progressed, each time I thought to myself that I didn’t have anything else to give, I managed to find something.  People who know me know that I am nicer than I first appear.  I have an extremely abrasive layer covering an annoyingly soft heart.  With each new crisis I dug a little deeper and found a little more empathy, cajoling, advice, and caring.  By the end of the day I’d come to a half realization that a good deal of meditation and a bit of ice cream solidified.   I had been considering my own state a sign of weakness.   And yet weakness would have been giving up.

Yesterday, today…I imagine quite a few of the days in my near future are going to be miserable.  They are going to be dark in the dead of summer. But a tiny little part of me knows I just found a slightly stronger version of myself.

–With love

Walking up to my best friend’s place for TLC yesterday.