This is Brent coming at you with another one of our manual stretching videos. In
this video we're going to go after our pectoralis minor, a muscle that has a
propensity to get very overactive, very short in all of those individuals with
upper body dysfunction. I'm going to have my friend, Yvette, come out and help me
demonstrate this technique. Now, first things first, we always want to talk
about body position. So I'm going to make sure that Yvette scoots down her hips right next
to mine so that I don't have to reach across the table, I can save my own low
back and my own mechanics. Next thing we have to think about is our kenesis, so
what is it that my pectoralis minor does, and with attachments that ribs three,
four, five, and my coracoid process, it is going to protract, downwardly rotate,
depress, and anteriorly tip my scapula. Now, the problem that comes in, is most people will
go, 'okay, great, got the pectoralis minor joint actions
going.' Understand how to stretch it, you put the person in position and you do
this and what do you feel? Nothing. This isn't enough of a stretch,
this doesn't take the pectoralis minor through enough lengthening for us to get
any sort of result. So we've got to use a little bit of a secret here, or a little
bit of a trick, very fancy piece of equipment also known as a gym hand towel.
I'm going to have Yvette go ahead and curl up, I'm going to place this towel out of
the level of the inferior angles of her scapula, and then have her lay back over
it. Now you will have to experiment with the size of the towel a little bit.
I find that the hand towels that we have here work very well, a bath towel
would probably be way too big. Now, I'm going to take Yvette through these joint actions
of elevation and upward rotation, and then I push her back into retraction, I
have that towel pressing on her inferior angle this way, and pressing her thoracic
spine into extension which is going to promote
a lot of posterior tipping. So now, when I go to press down, now how does that feel
Yvette? She can feel it in the lateral portion of her pec, and I can actually
feel that first resistance barrier. Now, why would I want to stretch the pec
minor? I think some of you are probably thinking, 'you just showed us a
pec stretch on that video on pectoralis major', and that's true, however, the pec
minor can be hidden in that stretch. These big stretches, these big motion
stretches, latissimus dorsi and pectoralis major specifically, there's a
lot of structures that could be involved. We could have pec major, we could
have lat, teres major, subscapularis. If I know that the pec minor is bound down,
and I want to hit that structure specifically, this is probably
the best thing I can do. Further, if I want to hit pec major, and I want to make
sure I'm hitting pec major, I'm sure some of you guys have already experienced
where you take somebody into a pectoralis major stretch, and they're not
really feeling it throughout their entire pec, they just keep pointing at
their pec minor. Well, if you want to get this stretch better, you might have to do
a PEC minor stretch first. Now, all that set aside, how can we make
my pectoralis minor stretch a little bit better. I'm sure you will run into
people whose pectoralis minor is like a leather strap, and it just won't let go.
You can't get that release you're looking for. I have found a couple of tricks.
Number one, pectoralis minor, for whatever reason, seems to be very related to
stiffness in the thoracic spine. I don't know if there's some sort of arthro
kinematic reflex happening there that tones up the pec minor, but doing any
sort of release work for your thoracic spine, you can see that video on
thoracic spine self-administered mobilization from my videos, my manual
therapists can do your mobilizations, I think you'll find if you
do that first it's a lot easier to get a release in the pec minor. Further, the pec
minor has a propensity to really get laden down with trigger points. It might
also be much more effective for you to do your self-administered release
with a softball like I had on previous videos, or my manual therapist can do this manually.
So, once again, to just kind of repeat here, to improve the lengthening ability
to get the most out of a stretch for my pec minor, it is probably best to do my
thoracic spine release, and my pectoralis minor release first. And, if you are
having problems with somebody with upper-body dysfunction, doing these
techniques before you do some of your bigger structures like pec major
and latissimus dorsi is probably going to also increase the effectiveness of
your technique. So just going through the technique one more time here,
I have that towel set at her inferior angles, I'm going to set her arm
into slight flexion here, that's going to help promote the
posterior tipping. I'm going to put my hand over the lateral third of her
clavicle and her acromion process, not the humeral head, remember my pectoralis
minor does not cross my shoulder. So I want to be here. I'm then going to take
her into elevation or upward rotation, and push her back into retraction and
posterior tipping. I hope you got all of that. So that's elevation, upward
rotation, push back on the lateral third of the clavicle in the acromion process.
It's actually a really easy technique once you practice it a couple of times. I
hope you get great results from this technique. I think your clients will
definitely appreciate the specificity of this technique and what they can get out
of it for their posture. I'll talk with you soon.