What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we are going to talk about the stretch, but I want to start by saying this: as a physical
therapist stretching, and mobility work, and all those things have sort of become so non-prescriptive.
They're just done randomly and people are doing the things because they look cool, or
that people have told them to do.
That's a problem because if you don't need a certain stretch, or certainly, if you don't
need a certain mobility drill you shouldn’t be doing it.
All you might be doing is contributing more to your problem.
That being said, what I'm going to show you here today is going to help a problem that
almost all of us have.
I would say virtually every single one of us has a problem, where?
In our thoracic spine.
So what is that area?
First of all, it's that area of your spine, the mid-back.
You basically – we all know we have our lumbar spine, which is our lower back, our
cervical spine which is right here in our neck, and then we've got the rest of it.
That's the thoracic spine.
What we lose here is we lose the ability to extend through it.
We get more, and more, and more, and more flex.
You know what this looks like.
You can probably look at yourself right now – don’t change your body, you probably
just noticed that you're doing a little bit of this if you're sitting at the computer
watching this video.
So why do we have that?
Because we spend a lot of time on the keyboard.
Because we spend a lot of time driving.
Because we spend a lot of time texting.
Because we spend a lot of time with our hands in front of our body and we spend a lot of
time letting gravity beat us as we go down, down, down, down.
So we need the ability to thoracically extend.
Here's why: because when we can extend we can also rotate.
Try this right now.
Get all the way down here, and then try to rotate.
You're going to lock yourself up.
You don’t have the ability that you do as soon as I extend, now I can rotate much more
freely, because I've unlocked my spine.
I can also test how much movement I have at the shoulder when I get here in this flexed
position in the thoracic spine and I try to raise my arm up.
I get locked.
That's all I got.
When I come up here and I extend, now I can go all the way up back here more.
I've got a lot more ability to raise my arm up safely over my head.
So think about every exercise that impacts.
Almost every, single exercise that you do.
Lower body, or upper body.
So why do we want to fix it?
Well, we want to be able to have something that we can do before a workout.
You might be the type "Jeff, I don’t want to do anything."
Do this.
It's going to help.
You're going to fix thoracic extension and rotation at the same time.
Take a bar, a dowel, a wooden bar, or anything.
Lay on your stomach.
Now we're going to use one side to post off of, and the other side to rotate toward.
So what you're going to do is, you're going to lift up here, we'll use this side to post
off of, and you're going to just keep your leg down on that side.
So you're going to rotate here, all the way through, until you feel that stretch.
If you let this leg come up with you you're not really challenging the rotation in your
spine.
You basically just came and fell on your back.
So you want to keep this one knee in contact with the ground and come back.
Now Jessie, if you'll come up on top of me you can see that I've got full extension through
my thoracic spine, or as much as I have.
Which is better than just letting it stay flexed and stuck and I've rotated because
I've kept my hips in one direction and rotated my shoulders in the other direction.
So I've got that rotation going on.
Then we're just going to come down here.
Again, it feels great.
You're going to post up off this side here, come up, and then rotate.
Oh my God.
So again, we've got extension through the thoracic spine, and rotation together.
So do this about two, or three times in each direction.
Here, up, and each time you'll notice it gets a little bit easier.
I let me knee come up a little bit on that one.
Keep it down.
Right there.
All right.
So again, too much of all this random stretching and mobility work going on.
Especially, as I said, it gets under the skin of a physical therapist, but prescriptiveness
is important.
I can pretty much tell you that prescriptively, everybody needs to do this.
If you just do this one little drill it will help you no matter what you're training that
day.
All right, guys.
If you've found the video helpful make sure and leave your comments and thumbs up below.
In the meantime, if you're looking for a program that tries to do it the right way, tries to
prescribe the things that you need at the right time that you need them; then head to
ATHLEANX.com and get our ATHLEANX training system.
If you've found the video helpful, again, leave your comments and let me know what you
want me to cover, what else you want me to do here for you, and I'll do my best to cover
it in a future video.
All right, guys.
See you.