♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Okay, we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna talk about, yes,
you need to fix your rounded shoulders.
You look bad.
We're gonna do a three-step program.
Understand, understand this.
We're not judging.
I still have rounded shoulders,
I fight it every day.
(laughs)
I'm working on it all the time, I do.
And I think I've improved since,
if you look at our old videos.
- Oh yes, Bob.
- You know, I've improved, but I have a ways to go, yet.
So you never stop working on this.
- Well of course, Bob.
- By the way, if you're new to our channel,
please take a second to subscribe to us.
We provide videos, how to stay healthy, fit, pain-free
and we upload every day.
Also, if you get the chance, to go to bobandbrad.com.
What are we giving away, Liz?
- Oh, Saturday?
- This is a Saturday.
We're not giving away anything.
- But we will tomorrow.
- Tomorrow we'll start giving away something.
So you want to follow us on Facebook
cause we're always pinning our contest
to the top of the page.
So that'll keep you updated,
but you can go to the giveaway section at Bob and Brad
and that'll show you what's coming up.
Also go to Twitter, Instagram or TikTok
if you want a 60-second version of our program.
So, you want to fix your rounded shoulders.
I'm going to first show you a test, Brad,
that you can do to see if you have rounded shoulders.
Can I stand up, Liz?
All right, Liz says I can stand up.
So-
- You still got his head in there?
(laughs)
- Yeah, really, you know,
that's why I got a face for radio.
So you're gonna look at your thumbs
is what you're gonna do.
As you just stand here normally,
look how my thumbs are pointing towards each other.
- Oh, when you're standing, yeah.
- Yeah, that means my shoulders
are a little bit internally rotated.
- Yeah, so this...
I don't know if you can see the white stripes,
but from here to here,
big difference in how things are working.
- Now straighten up once, Brad.
Straighten up and watch the thumbs.
The thumbs start pointing towards the front now.
That's what you want.
- Where you're walking, yep.
- Now the first thing, the first
of this three-step program...
Watch this once.
If I round my upper back,
watch what it does to my shoulders.
See my shoulders-
- Well they come towards me, Bob.
- Yeah and they rounded, but watch my thumbs.
- Oh yeah!
- Okay, my thumbs are straight forward.
Now I'm gonna just round my upper back.
Look at that, they go right towards each other.
- Just like little magnets.
- So it is critical, if you want to improve your posture
and you want to improve the rounded shoulders,
you gotta fix that mid to upper back, this area up in here.
One of the best ways we have found for doing this
is actually just take a couple balls
or even one tennis ball,
and if you can want to come back here, Brad.
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And what you're gonna do
is you're going to lie on these things-
- Mmm.
- And you're gonna hit these different spots.
Like here, here, here, here, here, here.
And you can start off by actually doing it
up against the wall.
Do you mind doing that, Brad?
- No, sure.
So the whole idea is we're trying to,
if you are tight in the thoracic rib cage
where we're talking about, we're gonna loosen that up
so this posture is possible.
- Yeah, and if you've been doing it for a number of years,
this area can really tighten up.
I mean, it's got heavy ligaments
that hold the bones together.
So that's why we have you start against the wall
because this can be a very aggressive treatment.
But when you do it against the wall,
you can control how much pressure you're putting against it.
- And the reason we use a sock, you can see,
I can easily control-
- Yeah, you can move it around.
- Where it is.
I am gonna be on the left side of the spine
and you can roll up and down.
You don't have to.
And I'm pushing in pretty aggressively.
- And even do a little bit of this, Brad, right?
- Yeah, there you go.
That's a good idea.
Ooh!
- Even some angels while you're doing that.
Someday, Brad, right?
- Breathe.
- You'll be an angel.
- Well, yeah.
When the bell rings.
- (laughs) The bell rings.
- You know, from that movie?
Every time a bell rings, you get some wings.
- Yeah.
So now, as soon as you're able,
I want you to progress to lying on the floor
and that's gonna be a lot more aggressive.
I'm going to do it right here, Brad, even though-
- Yeah, you would not do it on your bed.
- You wouldn't do it on the bed because it wouldn't work.
- A carpeted floor works really well.
- So the same thing here,
I'm just gonna show you the positioning, basically.
I'm going to put it in place.
Now this is again, very aggressive
for a first-time beginner.
You may want to have a pillow
so that the pillow takes off some of the stress.
Sometimes we even put some towels over the balls
to take some of the stress off.
- [Brad] Right, exactly, so it's not so aggressive.
- Again, with the soft surface it's not aggressive at all,
to be honest with you, but I'm just showing you
when it's in place like this, you can again,
roll back and forth on it
or you can do some deep breaths like this
with your arms up overhead.
And you want to hit the different spots.
What I do every morning, did it this morning,
is I lie down on my back and I put my foot up
and I'm stretching my hamstring.
I got a railing right there,
and I lie on this thing.
- [Brad] Do you use a pillow or no?
- I don't use a pillow.
- [Brad] Once you get used to it,
you may feel comfortable without the pillow.
- Right.
But that works better than anything I've found
for improving my posture up here.
I've pretty much eliminated having pain up there
as far as knots, so.
- Because, so, you're getting, in your case,
you're getting hamstring stretch,
you're working on your posture
and you're relaxing those muscles.
- That's right.
Triple task there.
- The multitask times three, yep.
- All right.
The next one, as an alternative to that
you might try a ball in a chair, Brad.
- Oh.
I thought you were gonna say a ball and a chain.
(laughs)
Wow!
- Don't you even make any jokes about that, Brad.
- (laughs) Okay.
But no, you take a soft ball that's squishy.
This is like that kickball kind that says Crane on it.
I bought this at a store.
It was at the end and it's like,
it's only three dollars!
- That completely brings me back to my childhood.
- It does!
- Doesn't it?
- We used to play kickball.
- With this type of ball.
- Yeah and it was fun.
So, you know, that's a double whammy.
You get to enjoy your history,
if you're 50 years and older.
- Yeah, little nostalgia.
- And now, so the soft ball allows you
to roll into it.
- But look what he's doing here:
he's extending, but he's gonna externally rotate
at the same time.
- Right, so we're doing...
Breathing in and exhale and relax and arch over that ball
and arms back so we're getting a complete stretch
to get that posture where we want it to go.
You might adjust the ball up and down.
And I wouldn't say might, but you should.
You'll find that certain locations it feels better
and you may, and probably will, feel your back
do a little cracking.
- Sure.
(cracks)
This one's really a nice exercise
cause it's actually leading into the second phase
of what you need to do to fix around your shoulders,
and that is, you've got to stretch the pectoralis major here
and minor and the internal rotators.
So internal rotation is this:
they bring the shoulder in like this or in like this.
That's what internally rotates your shoulders.
We want to stretch them
so that you can externally rotate the shoulder.
- That gets the thumbs in the right position.
- That's one way to do it.
Another way is, sometimes, if you could picture
a door frame right here,
you can actually put just one arm up
and lean into the door
and that would actually put a stretch
and you're actually going
into external rotation a little bit.
You can use a corner.
Brad, do you want to show it on a corner?
- Sure.
So yeah, there, yep.
And no, you can go on both.
I was saying as both.
Now you can lean in and see how he's stretching the chest,
but he's also stretching the arms into external rotation
a little bit.
You can even move the arms out while he's doing that.
- [Brad] Well, that helped right there from here to here.
- [Bob] Yep, there you go.
- Yep.
Don't get too aggressive with this.
That can be pretty aggressive.
If you've never done it
just take it gentle the first few times.
Get a feel for it.
- Exactly, if you've never done it before.
That's the key, isn't it, Brad?
- That's right.
- So, why don't you show,
now step three is we gotta
start strengthening those muscles
that are gonna hold it back and keep it back.
Why don't you show with that band, Brad
and then I'll show with one of the bands over here.
- So the stretching is very important.
Those two steps, do those first.
- Yeah.
- Once you get loosened up, then do the strengthening.
This is just a typical tube stretch band.
The handles are removed, which you don't need, in this case.
You can go single.
- You can use a loop.
You could, you know,
there's a lot of different things you could use for this.
- Yeah, I had a patient, she used a rubber snubber
for holding sound stuff in the car.
- A rubber what?
- Rubber snubber.
You know, it's got the hooks
for holding down stuff in your car.
- Rubber snubber?
- Oh Bob's so out of the loop.
(laughs)
They got hooks for holding down things
on the back of your car so like your-
- Bungee cord, right!
- Yes!
- Who calls it a rubber snubber?
Is that from the '20s or something?
- Bob, Bob, you're out of the loop.
(chuckles)
(indistinct) rubber.
Okay, here we go.
- I remember back in the '20s.
- There we go.
So we're going to do this.
- Yep.
So he's externally rotating the shoulders,
but he's also extending back a little bit.
So he's tightening the muscles between the shoulder blades
a little bit, too, and you can see
how his shoulders, his shirt is wrinkling up there
and that whites are coming together.
So you're catching both strengthening aspects
at the same time.
Works really well.
- And we can go to this and do the-
- Sure.
- Like "The W" we call it.
Just don't let it get you in the face.
- Well a better option for that, Brad,
is if you want to come over here, Liz.
- [Brad] Exactly.
- Use our wall anchors.
If you have them for other reasons, anyway,
you can go ahead and hook it up at the top one,
you can hook it up to the middle one,
but you can go ahead and I'm going to go ahead
and this is actually the one I do, Brad.
I extend, and then I externally rotate.
- Sure, so he's getting this.
- Extend, externally rotate.
- And this.
- Extend, externally rotate.
And I do like 50 of these-
- You do?
- In a row, yeah, cause it's a toning muscle,
you know, it's a postural muscle.
You want to work on-
- High reps.
- Yep, high reps.
And what's nice about the wall anchors
is that you can just pop it off,
you can put it at a different level
and you can do chest or anything else like that
at the same time.
I gotta put in a little plug for them, right?
- Yeah, you should, Bob, but do them the other way,
because I think it's important to do them at this level
as well, cause you're working,
you're working the middle traps versus the lower traps,
which lower traps are-
- Well here, I'm gonna do it this way.
Like this and like this.
- Yeah there you go.
- Like that.
- Got a good view of that, don't you, Liz?
Yep, and we want to make sure that, there you go.
- Now let's say you're out there and you're going,
"I don't want to spend any money right now."
I understand that.
Just grab a pillow.
- [Brad] Oh yes.
Lie on the pillow,
and you're going to go down like this,
you're going to bring your arms up
and you're going to externally rotate.
Arms back, externally rotate.
Now, for those of you who are just starting this,
this will be plenty enough stress for you.
- [Brad] Yes.
- Eventually you might take a couple soup cans.
- [Brad] And hold on to them.
- Yep.
(laughs)
Just go to the soup kitchen.
- [Brad] Don't just set them on the floor.
- Yeah.
(laughs)
Good point.
- You're not gonna do that on your bed
because it's too squishy.
You need to go...
Well, you could, possibly.
- Maybe with a couple pillows, right.
- Right, but on the floor, carpet floor works well,
but yeah, again, you could do it on the bed
now that I think about it.
- Yeah.
Do you want to say anything else?
I want to say a lot of things, Bob,
but people are getting bored.
- Remember, Brad and I are not just pretty.
- Except for...
No, wait.
- What?
We're not just pretty.
- Yeah.
We're not pretty, except (laughs)
- We're pretty ugly, you're supposed to say.
- Pretty ugly, wow.
- And I'm supposed to say we're pretty handy!
- Why, Bob, why?
What's going on with my mind.
It's the aging process.
I can't take it anymore.
- All right, thanks for watching everybody.
(deep electronics beep)