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♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion of course, Bob.
- I looked like I'm meditating there.
Three simple exercises, to stop winging shoulder blades.
This is quite, very dear to me
because Brad when I was in my 20s,
I lost my serratus anterior.
- Did you ever find it?
- No, I never found it.
No, what actually, what happened is the
the long thoracic nerve got inflamed and it died.
So I lost the muscle.
It atrophied, and it's gone.
- So you had a winging scapula for a very good reason.
- Right I had a very winging scapula,
but now some of the other muscles seem like they've
come in and helped out, and helped.
But anyway, so, it's a big problem with me.
And this is what I have been doing to try and
compensate for it.
- Sure
- It is improved. Not completely gone yet, but uh,
we will talk about that.
- Well on the way.
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- Same concept as their bed.
- Yep, same concept as their bed,
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- There you go, Bob.
- So again we are talking about the serratus anterior,
and what I have here is a shoulder blade.
Uh, it's just a model,
and it's got some of the muscles on it.
But, Brad's going to be the model here.
And here's the shoulder blade on the right side
With a winging shoulder blade you know,
a winging scapula, basically, it's sticking out like this.
It's like you've got angel wings, or something on the back.
- Well thank you, Bob.
- Yeah.
Um, anyway so the muscle, the serratus anterior,
what it does, it takes the shoulder blade and holds up
against the rib cage and it also turns it up like this.
It play's that role also,
because it attaches in to the ribs
and it has that action.
So what we're first going to try teach you to do,
is to visualize and feel this shoulder blade
being held close to your ribs while
you are lifting your arm.
So we got one exercise.
We are going to start with that,
and then we are going to show you other exercises
to help engage that, why you're-
activity of lifting and stuff like that.
- This has a lot to do with your arm movement
as well as, it's a stabiliser of the shoulder.
- Oh it is. If you are having shoulder
problems in fact, this is one you really
want to look at first,
is that you want to make sure
your shoulder blades are strong and have a good base.
otherwise it's going to throw everything off
at the shoulder.
- It is kind of a difficult one to exercise because
it's so concealed under there and it's moving
the shoulder blades which you really can't see it
- No.
- It's not like your arms and legs.
- It's very hard, actually, to do this one
and that's why we're going to give you this exercise
as one to try.
So I'm working on the right side.
I'm going to get a couple of pillows here.
Just, it put's me in a good position here.
So I'm working on this shoulder blade,
and what I'm going to do,
is I'm going to take the hitchhiker thumb
I'm going to point it behind me.
And Brad's going to show you why this make's a difference
So, I'm like this, and Brad you're going to show how.
- Yeah, so he's got his hands in the normal position,
thumb down.
Now look at this.
Normally we'd have Bob take his shirt off so you can see it,
But, you know, the women just go crazy so we wanna
keep things at bay.
Keep it, you know, medical and professional so do that yeah.
So, now here's the-
There we go. So, actually winged out more before.
I don't know what you did differently. There.
- There we go.
- What did you do before? There.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I can literally put my finger underneath
his shoulder between his shoulder blade and the ribs.
Now, go ahead, and see how I push my finger right out.
You can feel the muscles tighten up back here.
And pulling that shoulder blade where we want it.
- So I'm gonna go ahead and put the hitchhiker thumb back.
Gonna pull my shoulder's together a little bit.
And now I'm thinking about
trying to push that shoulder blade into my rib cage.
You know, I can't tell if its doing it or not,
but I'm trying, so, and then I bring the arm
up at the same time.
And you want to do ten repetitions of this,
and get that feeling of what it feels like to put that
shoulder blade against the rib cage.
Because you are going to need to do this later
with all exercises that you do.
- So my hand is here.
You can see how my hand is moving.
I'm doing nothing more than showing the movement of his
scapular or his shoulder blade.
And he's maintaining that blade up against the rib cage,
with that motion.
- Right. So once you go ahead and do that on both sides,
now you kind of have a sense of what it feels like
to do that.
And now you can go ahead and do it with different exercises.
So, I'm going to do it with a chair doing kind of dips.
- Sure.
- And this is something that I, I use a dip bar at home.
And I make sure that I,
the first thing that I do is get in place like this,
and I engage the shoulder blades.
- Squeezing back.
- Squeezing back or pushing them down as best as
I can and I keep it that way.
I'm thinking about that the entire time I'm doing the dip.
- Right
- Now you can do it in a chair like this,
which is nice because you can
use your legs to help out here.
But you can squeeze your shoulder blade and push it down in
to the rib cage,
and work on this and that'll help strengthen that,
while you're doing it.
Okay. Another one you can do is push ups.
So, and you can do knee push ups
if you want to start off with,
or you can go ahead and this is the one where I discovered
I was really winging because I thought I looked so nice
and straight, and I looked terrible.
And I still don't look great, but I've improved.
- Right. We did a video on this on a few months back and
there was a number of comments, they weren't,
people weren't satisfied with it.
- Right. So, I'm trying to, again,
engage my serratus anterior, push the wing,
stop the winging.
While that's in place, now I'm going to go ahead
and do a push up.
Am I straighter, Brad?
- Your rights a little higher than your left
but I can tell you are squeezing it down.
Are you are breathing, Bob?
- I'm trying to. (laughs)
- You are very, very focused on that perfect form.
- It really is hard.
But, I found out after a while that the push ups actually
were easier when you engage the shoulder blade so.
And if that's too hard for you, to do push ups,
I mean you could do push ups off a counter, or, you know,
anything.
- Right.
- Or off a wall.
And really work on engaging that shoulder blade.
- So you're kind of thinking about, you're pulling them in.
Do you think about bringing them down?
- Yeah that is not a bad thing to think too, yeah. I mean...
- This is one of those things, you just have to think
where they are going. And sometimes, like we tell people
think about putting your shoulder blades
into your back pockets.
That will help engage certain muscles.
- Yeah, I don't know why, you know, I don't know if this is
going to be a hard thing for people to do or not,
but it was a little bit hard for me.
I'm guessing it is going to be hard.
So it is something you have to work on.
Pull-ups is another one, were it's really important...
I'm go to go hands out, like this.
So I try to engage them right away.
- Now you can see he is flat and right in here. Very nice.
- And I'm going to go ahead and try to hold that
the whole time.
And I don't know how well I'm doing with it,
but I'm trying to.
- No that- it looks good, Bob.
Your shirt pulled across very nicely.
- It was. Okay.
- So how many of these repetitions will you do
of all of these?
- Well, it depends, like yeah,
on dips I do ten.
On push ups I do twenty.
And um, pull ups I do ten, eight, eight, eight repetitions.
- Yeah.
- And then I start to fatigue.
I mean it's going to be what people are able to perform.
I mean even when you do curls,
- Sure.
- You want to make sure those are engaged.
- Right.
- It's important for your posture.
It's important for your performance.
- Sure.
- It helps with both.
- It just- We got time, I was just going to say a friend of
mine I swim with, he was talking about this,
he was looking at some swimming videos,
and they talked about engaging that muscle
to get your shoulder blades to get,
to be part of the swimming stroke.
- Oh, gotcha.
- So, I really focused on it.
And I timed my one hundred like I always do,
and I actually gained about 3 or 4 seconds,
and I can't say it was just from that,
but I think it was.
- I, again, push ups have become so important-
it was to the point, were I think my,
they were winging so bad it wasn't providing any support.
And it was getting-
Push ups were harder and they kind of hurt.
(laughs)
So, you know, I think it's just something you-
start off with the exercise on the bed,
and work towards engaging with the other exercises.
- This reminds me of that movie,
where every time a bell rings, you get your-
- Wings?
- Yeah. An angel gets his wings, yeah.
- A wonderful life. It's a Wonderful Life.
- You could be getting one of your wings
- I'm getting rid of my wings is what I'm doing. (laughs)
- Well, I don't know why, Bob.
- I'll become a doll.
(laughs)
- Remember, Brad and I aren't just pretty.
- We're pretty ugly.
- No, we're pretty helpful.
- Pretty helpful and handy.
- There you go.
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