Shoulder Bone is connected to the.... Back Bone?

As the weather is warming up, I am getting excited for some open water swimming this summer. I registered for the Fat Salmon Open Water Swim that is taking place July 15. If you have been keeping up on my blog posts, you will remember that I have been spending much of the last year focused on run training. It has been a bit of a shift for me to stop pounding the pavement and hop back into the pool.

Nothing like starting my open water training while on vacation in Hawaii!

From all this swimming, I can’t help but notice my shoulders talking to me a bit. It got me thinking about those of us getting on into our forties, and how many of our athletic pursuits require overhead mobility, whether it be swimming, CrossFit, or other sports like tennis. And how most of us also spend 40+ hours a week in front of a computer, hunched over, typing away or on a work call.

Try this…

…sit slouched or rounded in your thoracic spine and try to reach your hands directly over the head, arms straight. Can you feel the pressure in your shoulders? Now sit tall and open, stretching the crown of the head to the ceiling and reach above your head again. Can you notice how much easier that is?

the shoulder only achieves its full overhead reach when the thoracic spine extends. 

How can we put this to work? Enter the peanut and the resistance band. Here are 3 videos of activities we can do to help achieve that overhead reach by improving the thoracic spine mobility, and strengthening the muscles around it.

First, you can mobilize your upper thoracic spine using the peanut with the video to the left.

Follow that up with the active thoracic and shoulder rotations alongside the wall.

Finally, re-educate with some resistance work using the band anchored into a door.

There are so many other ways we can work on improving our ability to reach overhead, but life is busy and it is tough to take more time out of our day to prioritize this. Having just these 3 activities to do a few times a week will be effective, and hopefully won’t require too much time taken out of your day.