How to Fix Your Shoulder Imbalance

For those of us that have shoulder pain, neck pain, upper back pain, if you did your assessment and the broom went forward like so, or one side went forward, which means one side is really tight, we're going to fix it in this video and show you how to open up your chest, create better posture, get rid of that stiffness, and feel a lot better before the end of the video. Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, in the description there's a way for you to get your own at-home broomstick squat test. It's pretty simple to do. It takes 18 seconds. For the rest of us, do these 3 moves and feel better right now. The first step to opening up your shoulders is an old basic that I'm going to show you how to master and do the correct way, the chest wall stretch. Now, the first movement you want to do is you want to release your sympathetic nervous system. That creates guarding and tension around the shoulder joint. So what you're going to do instead of just starting to stretch, You're going to push into the wall first for 5 seconds like you were doing a chest fly. So I'm going to press into the wall. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And then I'm going to twist my body off and get the stretch there. Try to keep your shoulder close. If you come off like this, there's not a lot of stretch there. So try to keep your shoulder as close as possible and really retract and pull those shoulder blades together as you open. Do this for 30 seconds. Then after your 30 seconds, go back and press again. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then stretch. To properly do this, do this 4 times through. So 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds, 5 seconds, 30 seconds. It sounds like a lot, but if you have shoulder postural issues, How long do you want to wait to have relief? It's only 2 minutes. Take your 2 minutes and do both sides. 5 seconds of pushing. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. 30 seconds of stretching, 4 times through. Then move on to our next movement. This next movement gets skipped more times than I can count. Everybody's trying to fix the shoulder, fix the shoulder, fix the shoulder, and they forget about the shoulder blade. Your shoulder blade is actually connected. If you could see through me and see my shoulder blade, it's connected to your shoulder joint. So if you don't fix that, guess what? Shoulder joint doesn't move the way it's supposed to. They're connected. You got to fix them both. So what we're going to do is called scapular retraction. Scapula is a fancy word for shoulder blade. We're going to get our shoulder blades to go together. Fancy word for retraction. And then push them apart just like so. Try to keep your elbows locked in position. Don't try to bend them and do a push-up. Squeeze your shoulder blades together like if there's a pencil in between my shoulder blades. I'm going to pinch them together and then push them apart. As you're pushing apart, push them around your rib cage and then squeeze. Do 10 pauses. And once you've done these 10 pauses, we're going to move on to our next movement that gets skipped way off way too many times, way too often, in my opinion. And you're going to feel great afterwards. Let's go. The next thing we're going to stretch is your lats. This gets skipped all the time. Go to the corner of your couch or a counter or a desk, something that's, you know, around the height of your knee or your hip. You want to start there because that's the perfect place for you to get a good stretch out of your lats. Your lats are these muscles right here that connect into your armpit, and when they're tight, they round the shoulder head in and forward, and that's why you feel pinching when you raise your arms above your head. To fix it, we're going to stretch the lats out. Now, to do this move properly, grab the bar or broomstick with your fingers facing you so your knuckles are facing away. Keep your hands shoulder-width apart. And then as I lower my body, I'm going to lower my hips, my head, and the bar simultaneously and pull my hips away from my elbows, keeping my elbows in place. That's a lot of instructions, so just watch and pay attention. I'm going to lower and stretch. Now you want to do this 10 times and really feel those lats stretch out. This is also a super good stretch for your T-spine or upper back. Once you've done 10, Go back and reevaluate. Do that squat test again and look where the bar is at. If it's sitting farther back, that means you have less tension on your shoulder joints. Your posture is improved. You probably stand taller. You feel better, but it's not a permanent fix. Remember, this is a temporary fix. For a permanent fix, you have to strengthen the muscles around those areas to get everything to stay in place. Now, to do that, you have to do the second step or the next step in our reset protocol, and that's below in the description. So go in the description of the video and take the next step so you don't have to worry about pain coming back.