What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
Here's an ATHLEAN XPRESS video for you that you're going to be able to start utilizing
right away.
How to start stretching out your middle back, your upper-middle back.
We all hear about the low back.
One of the most ignored areas that's in need of stretching is our upper-middle back.
We feel a lot of our stress up in this area.
Especially if you're doing a lot of Deadlifts and a lot of back training, you're going to
get tight in between your paraspinal muscles in between your scapula.
So, we have to have a way to target that.
Unfortunately, a lot of the ways that we do that, we have 3 different ways that we do
that.
One of them, we'll just hang from a bar, ok.
The problem with that is that we're really just working out our lats at that point
because we're only working on the upward and downward rotation of our scapula.
We're doing nothing to pull our scapula around our body, so that's not going to work.
Number 2.
We do kind of a cross our body stretch this way, right.
This is getting a bit of this protraction around our body, ok.
This movement of the scapula out and around, but you know what happens?
We get limited by our posterior capsule in our shoulder
which is usually really tight in most people, especially if you're an athlete.
So, this kind of gets limited by shoulder, internal shoulder tightness.
So that doesn't make a good option.
So the third thing we do is, we try to do a stretch where we kind of hold on here and
we sink down, right.
That's sort of our classic lat stretch.
Again, it's a lat stretch.
It's not really getting that pulling the scapula around the body.
If you think about what these muscles in the back do in that area of the middle traps,
the lower traps, they pull the shoulder blades down and back and together.
So we've got to get them up, out and around.
So the best way to do that is by setting up something in front of us that allows us to
do this.
I'm going to do it here on a cable machine.
Don't worry.
You do the exact same thing inside of a doorway, the exact same thing.
You position yourself in between your doorway, or in this case I have my cables and you take
your right arm and you move it across your body
so we're getting againt that bit of protraction out in front of us.
Take the left arm, and you cross it over to the other one this way.
And then from here, you just sink back.
See, because the movement is, you want the arms to be pulled out in front of you.
If I have them pulled out in front of me, we're getting that protraction.
We're getting those shoulder blades pulled apart.
So here, in the doorway, I'm grabbing one frame of the door, I'm grabbing the other
frame of the door, and I sink back.
Now from here, here's the key point.
If you want to get those middle traps and those lower traps, especially the lower traps,
what we want to do is
we want to elevate the shoulders because we want to depress them.
We want to elevate the shoulders.
And we want to do that by breathing in, letting your butt tuck under, breath in deep, and
lift your shoulders.
So, I'm sinking back, I'm breathing in and lifting the shoulders up at one time as I'm
letting my arms pull away.
And you can see, this is one of the greatest stretches you can possibly do to target that
really hard to reach area.
And you just hold it like you would a normal stretch for about 60 seconds or so if you
want to start causing some length changes.
So, guys, when we target these muscles, remember, every muscle has a function.
And in order to get at that muscle, you've got to basically reverse-engineer that function.
And if the function is to pull this way, we want to stretch it by getting it the other
way.
And if the function is to rotate it up, we want to do something to rotate it down.
It's all about putting science back in strength.
It's also about putting science back in stretching.
If you found this helpful, guys, start using it.
I'm promising you, you're going to start to feel a much bigger release in that area.
Make sure you leave a comment and a thumb's up.
And if you're looking for a training program that kind of covers everything, all the bases
from A to Z, and does it in an athletic way, this is what we talk about here,
let's train like an athlete, let's stretch like one also, head to ATHLEANX.COM right
now and grab our 90-Day Training program.
Alright guys, we'll be back here again in just a few days.