What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
If you get Shoulder pain or discomfort when you're lifting weights you might be dealing
with a tight Posterior capsule.
Today I'm going to show you, first of all what the Posterior Capsule is,
secondly a way for you to test on your very own self without needing anybody to determine
whether or not yours is tight and
thirdly if it is, I'm going to give you a stretch that you can do to help fix that.
Now as far as the Posterior Capsule, it is a capsule structure that will contribute and
tighten over time to lead to this forward or rounded Shoulder posture.
The way it does that is usually because of what's going on with the muscles behind your
Shoulder.
So we know the Rotator Cuff muscles here, the Supraspinatus, the Infraspinatus and teres
minor, they all come around here,
they wrap around and attach to the side of your upper arm here and they control it's
movement.
Now we know that, the rotation of it, we know that if these muscles get tight they kind
of will do this,
they'll sort of stay down, tight and together, taper down and almost push this forward.
Well over time that leads to this kind of chronic tightening and shortening of that
Posterior Capsule,
it's a little bit deeper right inside here, that again holds the upper arm in place.
That's a bad story though, that's a bad situation.
Because as I said, any time you're in this position and you go to start lifting weights
up over head or even Bench Pressing,
you're causing a greater opportunity to start pinching some structures in here.
Because you just don't have the room anymore to lift your arm up.
Again, I've asked you to do this a lot of times, try to roll your arm in and then lift
your arm as high as you can.
you'll actually get a block.
So I want to show you now how to determine whether or not your Posterior Capsule is even
tight in the first place,
which a lot of you will find that it is, and then we can figure out a way to fix that.
Ok, so to figure out whether your Posterior Capsule is tight, you're going to want to
do this stretch.
Get on the ground here and you want to Internally Rotate your arm as far as you can.
Right, not just turn your wrist here or pronate your forearm but literally Internally Rotate
your arm as far as you can.
Now put it up here at 90 degrees, take your other hand and hold your Lat in place.
In other words try to keep your Shoulder Blade flat to the ground, ok, because you'll see
why in one second.
As I push down and I have my arm internally rotated as far as I can, now I'm just going
to try to reach across my body as much as I can.
And I'll see that, can I get this outside portion of my elbow to cross my chest, the
midline of my chest.
So if I'm looking right here, this is my target.
Again I keep my hand in here in place, all the way internally rotated and I'm trying
to move across.
Now for me, I can automatically feel a lot of tightness right through the back portion
here of my shoulder, right here the back of my shoulder.
So what I want to do is again, try to do that.
You see if I allowed my Scapula to come up off the ground here, then I could go way over.
That's not testing your Posterior Capsule guys, because we know that the your Shoulder
Blade is attached to your Shoulder,
so we want to make sure that we don't just let that happen.
We're looking for the isolated flexibility of the Posterior Capsule.
So if you could do this and you can't get it across the midline of your body, then you're
going to want to try to do the stretch I'm going to show you now.
If you can, you don't necessarily have to do this.
What you might want to check is the tightness of your Lats.
Because we know that the Lats are going to affect how high and how freely you can raise
your arm up over your head.
So you might want to check Lat tightness.
I often find that Lats are really commonly tight and it may not be necessarily your Posterior
Capsule.
So check that out if that's something that you're dealing with.
But for the rest of you, let's go on to the third part of this and I'm actually going
to show you the stretch.
Ok so the name of the stretch is called the Sleeper Stretch.
It's actually pretty easy to perform on yourself.
There's a few things you want to do to get yourself set up right.
First you want to get 90 degree bend here at your elbow.
Then you want to get your arm below 90 degrees, just a little bit, about 70 degrees abducted
so away from your side.
This will be 90 degrees away from my side, I'm going to go about 70 degrees.
Now really important, you want to lay here, you can put something under your head to support
your head here, I just didn't bring something with me at the moment.
But what you want to do is allow your body to pull your Shoulder Blade back, ok, so intra
retraction, I'll show you in a second here.
This is what it looks like here as you can see my back now doing that.
So I can actually pin the side of my Shoulder Blade, the outside border of my Shoulder Blade
down into the floor.
For the same reason, like I said in testing the stretch, you don't want to have that become
part of the equation here.
If you're going to isolate the Posterior Capsule, you want to make sure you're not allowing
the Shoulder Blade to move.
So the Shoulder Blade stays pinned here into the floor, then we take our hand, the opposite
hand, we actually hold underneath our elbow here,
to make sure it stays in position.
Get them leaned into the floor here so that my Shoulder Blade can't move,
and now all I do is I push down here through my elbow.
So I'm causing internal rotation here of my left Shoulder.
Now I don't crank on it really hard, I don't try to lift myself up because again now we're
allowing the Shoulder Blade to move.
I literally just kind of let my elbow gently push down into my forearm and I can feel that
again, right in here through the back of my Posterior Capsule.
Ok, now what we want to do is ultimately see if we can get to the point where we can touch
the floor.
Because you should have about 70 degrees of internal rotation.
But I'm far from it, I mean I can reach my fingers down as far as I can, I can't get
it there.
But it just means, I have to work on my Shoulder Capsule flexibility a little bit and mobility.
Ok, so that's all you do.
You try to hold onto this stretch for about 30 seconds maybe 3 times, do it a few times
a week,
and you'll gradually start to see that your internal rotation will improve via the capsular
mobility being improved,
not just stretching out the Rotator Cuff but actually working on the adaptations that have
been caused by the fact that your Rotator Cuff has been too tight all along.
Guys remember, when you're trying to train like an Athlete here, you've got to cover
all the issues.
It's not just about flexibility, it could be your mobility.
It's not just about your mobility, it could be about your strength.
It could be about tightness in areas that you're not even considering.
So you want to make sure you have all your bases covered.
I try to help you guys do that here on this channel.
And of course, I try to walk you through it all in our ATHLEANX Training Program.
If you haven't already joined Team ATHLEAN, and you want to get a step by step program
to start training like an Athlete,
then head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and get our ATHLEANX Training System.
If you found this helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below and whatever
else you want to see guys let me know
I will be sure and happy to help you in our upcoming videos.
Alright, I'll see you guys again soon.
Bye!