This is a good shoulder rehab exercise for improving shoulder flexibility for reaching overhead. It can help reduce shoulder stiffness caused by tight muscles, joint and myofascia.

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Transcript:

This is Manu Kalia, physical therapist and Ayurveda herbalist. This is another technique you guys can use to improve the flexibility or mobility of the shoulder, and more specifically, for being able to reach overhead. So some of you guys asked me to show you some other techniques to get that shoulder mobility better, so especially being able to reach overhead, and if there are soft tissue restrictions and possibly even the joint is a bit stiff, this can help with that, getting that ribcage structures, your lats and your triceps, to help mobilize and stretch those structures so you have restriction when you’re reaching overhead.

This is a relatively easy way to do that. So you can use a chair, anything that’s stable, and the different ways to do this is one position. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to stretch my right side so I lock in my right elbow, and all I do is I’m going to work at sitting down. So I could be in full kneeling position if I want and I could even do both at the same time, too, but we’re going to do one.

So the first part is just being able to sit back. As I sit back and I bring my chest down, I get to stretch a lot of these structures here, this area. I can use my hand here if I need to stabilize and bring my body down and I can go to the left, I can go to the right side, and you can hang out and oscillate and see which structures are tighter. So you can see how this works at improving the mobility of that full region.

So if I decide I want to hit more of the triceps you could even bend the elbow, and then I could…down here, so now I might get some more stretching in this region too. And if I sit back further, I’m going to start opening up a lot of these structures. And as I said, oscillate side to side to see what areas are tighter so you can hit it from different angles.

The next thing you can do is if you want to just isolate and you want to say, “Okay, maybe I want to get the upper part more, I don’t want hit these structures as much,” same position, I could lock it down, and I’m going to reach over with my left hand, I’m going to grab my shoulder blade, I’m going to tack it down so it doesn’t move or hold it in place, and I’m going to do the same thing and I’m going to sit down, and now I get a bit of a stronger stretch in this area. And I’m going to sit down and again oscillate, hang out, mobilize, go to the right a little bit, go to the left. So you’re hitting your different directions.

I can go down so I can come even further, a good way to get at that shoulder to get a lot of these soft tissue structures, bend that elbow, and now I can really hang out here. And I can even use my hand to glide down a little bit to mobilize that tissue.

So it’s a good way to work at getting that range back, get that mobility of that shoulder. You just have to be cautious and make sure there are no other joint issues happening, joint restriction. For that you have to be more specific. You’ve got to mobilize that joint, the glenohumeral joint, the shoulder joint, to make sure that joint mechanics are correct, so if it’s not impinging or it’s not getting caught. So sometimes if you get to the top and you get an impingement or pinching, it can also be of course the joint mechanics are not correct, so the joint capsule is too tight and it’s not in the right position and it’s resulting in impingement or pinching of either the rotator cuff or some of the other subacromial or other structures that are getting compressed in that space. So you’ve got to be careful about that when you’re doing this movement, but otherwise you just have to get that mobility back and get some of the…your ribcage, a lot of these other soft tissue structures, mobilized and just improve the length of those tissues. It’s a good way to get at that.

So I hope you enjoyed that video. Please share it if you found it helpful, and make sure you subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment if you have any questions. Thanks.