Скачать или смотреть Why Your Shoulders Hurt & What You Need to Do: Scapula Mobility/Warm Up

Our scapula, your shoulder blades, are the only movable joints that don’t really have a joint capsule where two bones connect. Fluidity of movement around the ribcage and spine is crucial for the health of our shoulders, to promote proper movement patterns and optimize our ability to build muscle.

It has a few primary functions: elevation (think shrugging your shoulders), retraction (shoulder blades pulling together), depression (shoulder blades pulling down), protraction (shoulder blades opened forward), and rotation (upward/downward rotation that gets paired across zones).

Like other joints, isometrics can be used to improve end ranges of motion. However because they aren’t bound to other bones like most synovial joints, very deliberate movement while exploring ranges of motion usually can get the job done. This simplifies training it, warming up and allows for you to spend time focusing on other areas that may need attention.

Scapula CARs, controlled articular rotations, can be done in an infinite amount of orientations when we consider the positions the upper arm is in. We can have movement done with both internal and external rotation of the humerus, arms straight and bent, and a various zones of flexion, extension, abduction and adduction.

Your scapula warm up should reflect whatever external, tasked based training you are doing and the functional weak points you have. If you’re doing overhead stuff, flexion based scapula CARs should be done. If you’re doing flat bench, scapula work in abduction/adduction in both zones of IR/ER. If your shoulder has history and you fundamentally lack internal or external rotation, your scapula work should reflect that weak point.

Irradiating tension is terribly overlooked when exploring work space and the scapula is no exception. Generating tension through your arms by clenching your fists, contracting your bicep, tricep, pecs and traps as you move through each corner (protraction, retraction, elevation and depression) should help “turn on” and “find” your ends ranges of motion.

Ultimately the focus is to create neural drive and ramp up internal awareness so we can more efficiently internally train our shoulders and improve the productivity of our traditional resistance training.