Last week, in one of my posts I mentioned how you should balance your pulling and your pushing movements. After that I received a lot of questions, about exactly what I meant with this.
Probably you’ve noticed that nowadays you could rarely see a person, who doesn’t have some kind of a bad posture. Some people have their shoulders forward, others stay in anterior tilt, posterior tilt, some sit to the side and etc.
In every single case the posture alignment could be at least improved. That could happen with an appropriate training program, that is focused on strengthening the weak muscles and lengthening the tight muscles. Unfortunately people rarely see workouts as a tool for improving health and posture.
Here is a great picture I found on the internet. It illustrates really good how muscle imbalances occur.
“The cumulative injury cycle illustrates how muscle imbalances originate. There is a trauma, which can result from repetitive motion with poor dynamic posture, or poor static posture.
The trauma causes inflammation which causes your muscles to spasm and develop knots or adhesions.
The adhesions decrease the functionality of your muscles which your brain cannot control properly. The inability of your nervous system to maintain proper postural alignment causes muscle imbalances.
If you do not correct your muscular imbalances the cycle will repeat over and over again and get progressively worse.”
How does that matter?
Nowadays, most people have a job that has to do with sitting in front of a desk, for long hours. When we sit, we usually don’t give it much thought, we don’t pay attention to our posture and we lean forward, drop our shoulders down and so on. Thus, this repetitive template, leads to tilting our posture. It turns out something like that:
Look around and you will see that right now, about 70% of people around you are sitting like this!
The main muscles, that are responsible for the shoulder retraction, are the once in the middle, upper back (lower and middle trapezius and rhomboids). When you sit like I mentioned above, these muscles lengthen, they don’t function the way they are supposed to and they become weak.
The main muscles which oppose to the shoulder retraction ( the pecs and deltoids) become way too tight and shortened.
Thus it turns out that the muscles, responsible for the shoulder retraction do not perform their main function, and those opposing the retraction are overdoing their work. And thus your posture tilts.
Probably you’ve noticed that usually, men who are keen on fitness, but men who don’t really care about proper training, and the only thing they care about is bench press, shoulder presses and biceps curls, have a really weird posture, with their shoulders dropping down, forward.
When you perform pushing movements, you load mainly the muscles responsible for taking your shoulders forward. By neglecting the pulling movements, you increase the imbalance between your back muscles and those on your shoulders and chest. Thus the muscles responsible for the shoulder retraction, become weaker and in reality what happens is that you are training to increase muscle imbalances!
As a person who used to have a lot of shoulder problems, I can tell you that tilting your posture, may lead to unnecessary neck, back and shoulder pain.
Personally I had a lot of problems with my posture, I used to keep my shoulders forward and down, but with the right exercises and the right training program, I managed to improve my posture dramatically and all the neck and back pain is gone!
That’s why my advice is to pay attention to your workout program and the balance between pushing and pulling movements! My advice is, to begin by doing two pulling movements for every pushing movement, in order to decrease the imbalance you have right now!
Do more dumbbell rows, renegade rows, barbell rows, pull ups (vertical and horizontal).
You could do some band exercises.
I recommend you do shoulder dislocations with a band and wall slides.
I recommend you read Jason Ferruggia’s article about shoulders and how to prevent shoulder injuries here!
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Thanks so much for your comments and exieprence, Scott. I have to say for me it’s like which came first the chicken or the egg. I can see what you are saying, and I will truly do some thinking/reading on that matter: with the clients I work with, I am not convinced it was posture decline before the range of motion restricted, (refused to sit with good posture so that the muscles no longer have the range of motion? hmmm). The one example I was referring to is the hamstring and it’s restriction on posture through the lower back, (sitting on their sacrum as opposed to the sit bones because their hamstrings area so tight). I see lots of that with clients in certain exercises and many of the students and athletes that I do some fitness classes with. I also have clients who greatly benefit from the range of motion in the upper extremities, even if it is an aerobics class not athletes. I can think of several exercises that would be better done if a certain range of motion was acquired. Great discussion topic Scott.