Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:12] Hello and welcome to Deep in your yoga practice. I am Lauren Leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. And today's episode, we will deepen our practices by talking about the shoulder.
[00:00:26] So this is shoulders 101. We'll talk about mobility, stability and how to have a sustainable yoga practice. So a few things that we'll talk about first is understanding what the shoulder actually is, knowing that it's a complex, not a single joint. We'll talk about how shoulders are designed to move and stabilize. We'll identify common restrictions and pain patterns both in yoga and daily life. And we'll build a practical plan for mobility, strength, control, and how to use your shoulders within different contexts. Overall, you can know that the shoulder wants mobility, but it demands stability.
[00:01:09] So we'll keep coming back to that through this episode today. So raise your hand if you have had shoulder pain before, but maybe don't raise your hand if you're feeling shoulder pain right now. I know, certainly I have know that most shoulder discomfort isn't weakness or tightness alone, although certainly those can be contributing factors. It has to do with coordination and load tolerance. And yoga is full of shoulder demands. We load the shoulders a lot through things like downward facing, dog plank chaturanga, side plank, arm balances, as well as through deep mobility like binds, even sometimes through yin poses, where we are stressing the ligaments a little bit more. So my intention is to help deepen your understanding of this and to be able to load your shoulders and stretch your shoulders with more awareness and intentionality. So we often talk about the shoulder as a joint, but in fact, it is a complex. There are actually four key joints that create what we call the shoulder. First is the glenohumeral joint, or gh. And it's kind of like a ball and socket, but a very shallow socket. It is built for range, so it's built to be able to swing your arm around and move your arms and hands in all different directions. But it's not necessarily built for stability.
[00:02:39] So this is where your upper arm bone or humerus bone and your scapula or shoulder blade meet. So that's your glenohumeral joint. Next we have scapulothoracic articulation.
[00:02:52] So this isn't exactly a joint, but it's how the scapula glide on the rib cage. So your scapula rotate, they move up and down, they protract, they retract. So they're meant to move in many directions. And the way that they move is Huge for your shoulder health and overhead motion, as well as weight bearing. The third joint is the acromyoclavicular joint, or ac. And this is where the collarbone meets the acromion process. This is a bony triangular projection at the top of the shoulder blade, or scapula that forms the highest point of the shoulder. So that connects to your collarbone. And this is really important for overhead and cross body movement. And we also have the sternoclavicular joint, or sc. And this is where your collarbone meets your sternum or breastbone. And it's the only actual bony connection of arm to torso. So you don't have to memorize this, these different joints. But just keep in mind that the shoulder is complex. It's not just the ball and socket that we think of. And that shoulder motion is this shared motion across many bones and muscles. And if one piece can't move well, for instance, if the scapula can't move well, then other pieces will be affected by that and feel cranky. So those are the joints. Let's go into the bones and architecture of this shoulder joint. So we talked about the scapula. This is your shoulder blade. It's like this mobile platform. So it moves in a lot of different ways. Elevation or lifting, depression or pressing down, protraction or spreading apart from each other, abduction and retraction, drawing toward each other or adduction. Also upward rotation and downward rotation. So they need to be able to move in a lot of different ways to be healthy and functional. We also have the humerus bone. This is your upper arm bone. This is the ball that forms the ball and socket. And it needs this centered control to be functional. It's also connected to 13 different muscles and helps move your arm. We also have the clavicle. We can think of this as a strut, helps position the scapula. And we can also think of the rib cage and thoracic spine. So your ribs and the upper spine that is connected to the ribs as the wall that the scapula has to glide on. So anytime we are moving our shoulders, we're really organizing our scapula, our ribs and our humerus. There are also lots of soft tissues that come to play here, meaning muscles and fascia and ligaments. You've probably heard of the rotator cuff before, or rotator cuff injuries before. This is a team of muscles that stabilize and steer the humerus, or upper arm bone in its socket. And it consists of the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis. They also help raise the arm overhead and rotate the arm outward and inward. They help keep the shoulder stable and strong. We also have scapular stabilizers. So these muscles that stabilize the scapula, which again is meant to move in a lot of different ways. We have the serratus anterior, which is kind of on the lateral side of the body, and the upper ribs. Sometimes I call these the armpit bandha. And we use these a lot for things like plank and chaturanga. Really any load bearing postures. We have the lower or mid traps, which are in the upper mid back and they're responsible for upward rotation and posterior tilt. We also have the rhomboids. These draw the shoulder blades together and help rotate them downward. These are important muscles, but I know for me this is where I tend to get a lot of pain and discomfort in my body. A lot of us can overuse them when we're not firing the other muscles that help stabilize and support the shoulder. And another scapular stabilizer that we have are the levator, scapula and upper trap. So these help lift the shoulders up and they're very useful, but they're often overworked as well. So many of us have a lot of tension, especially through the upper trap. So where like the neck and shoulders meet, oftentimes we're stretched and we're lifting the shoulders in this kind of unconscious way. But they are important stabilizers. We just need to learn how to contract and relax them. There are also some muscles that we'd consider to be like the big movers of the shoulders. And these sometimes overcompensate or restrict movement. So we have our pecs or our chest muscles, pec major and pec minor. And when they're tight, they can pull the scapula or shoulder blades forward and down into anterior tilt. So these are tight for many of us due to our lifestyles.
[00:07:58] We also have our lats, so the big muscles that run along these sides of the back.
[00:08:06] And these can limit overhead flexion or drawing your arms overhead and flare your ribs out when they are feeling tight.
[00:08:15] So we can work with our yoga practice to help mobilize both pecs and lats for optimal shoulder function. We also have the deltoids. You can, if you're looking at like a real muscular person, it's that cap on the top of their shoulder so they're in the front and the back. And sometimes these can be really dominant when they're not working in tandem with the rotator cuff. We also have fascia in the area of the shoulders. So the shoulder function due to the connections of the fascia are influenced by the chest, the neck, the back, and even the arms. And if you want to dive deeper into that, you can look into the superficial front and back arm lines Through Tom Meyer's anatomy trains work. We also have ligaments in the shoulders and the shoulder capsule. So this shoulder capsule needs balanced mobility. If it's too lax, there is instability there, and if it is too stiff, we start to feel impingement. Ligaments here connect bone to bone and they are crucial for stability, stability and preventing dislocation. They are also designed to provide for range of motion, which makes it all the more important to learn to use the muscles to stabilize the shoulder if we're doing weight bearing exercises on it. Because ligaments do not have a lot of blood flow, when they're injured, it can take a long time for them to heal. So how is the shoulder supposed to move? What is an optimally functioning shoulder? One is that overhead motion. So moving the arms overhead is this coordinated dance. The humerus, or upper arm bone moves the scapula or shoulder blades upwardly rotate and posteriorly tilt. And the clavicle rotates and elevates to allow for scapular motion. So basically bringing the arms overhead lifts the scapula and the clavicle for functional motion. Oftentimes, yoga actually gets this wrong. There have been many common cues for a long time to draw the shoulders down during overhead flexion, Meaning while drawing the arms overhead. And this can jam the joint. So we allow the shoulder blades to lift as we're drawing the arms overhead. Typically what I will cue instead, or maybe use a hands on assist to communicate, is just softening through the upper traps and levator scapula as we do this, not not using them entirely, but just avoiding really clenching in that area. This overhead motion too can sometimes be compromised in kind of hanging out in our passive or end range. So say you're downward facing dog with arms overhead, and instead of integrating the shoulders and strengthening into the posture, you're kind of sinking into the chest and hanging out in your ligaments. So I usually cue something like pressing the hands down into the mat and away from the head, drawing the upper arm bones toward each other, maybe even wrapping the shoulder blades around the back. Although different folks will have kind of different ranges of motion and places where they feel most strong there, and that helps avoid hanging out in the ligaments. There are some common restrictions and pain patterns that happen in the shoulders. These are not diagnoses these are just patterns.
[00:11:36] And you might notice if you felt any of these in your body.
[00:11:40] So one is limited overhead flexion. So you might find it difficult to bring the arms fully overhead. Maybe in that's in something like or va hastasana or upward salute. Maybe that's in something like handstand or forearm balance. This can often come from lack of range of motion in thoracic spine. So in the upper spine that connects with the ribs. Also tightness in the lats. So these those big muscles on the outer back that run really from your armpit down to your low back as well as stiffness or tightness in the pecs. So in the chest and the scapula do not want to upwardly rotate. So they might feel kind of stuck on the back. And again, this might show up in orvastasana or something like handstand. You might feel it in downward facing dog as well or in wheel. Another restriction or pain pattern you might feel is anterior shoulder discomfort or pain or discomfort in the front of the shoulder. In Chaturanga or plank pose, this might mean that the humeral head or upper arm bone head is gliding forward too much, that the pecs or chest dominate too much, and that the rotator cuff and serratus are not firing enough. Or maybe they're weak. This might be rushing the load. This might also be from loading the anterior part of the shoulder too much. So I'm typically going to cue for something like a 90 degree angle or more in Chaturanga. And there are a lot of different ways I practice that with students, but it does typically help to avoid this pain. Another pattern we might see is neck and upper trap dominance. I talked about this a little bit, but the scapula rides up, the ribs will flare, the place between neck and shoulders gets really tight and held. And this might cause us to hold our breaths. We might be under recruiting our serratus anterior or lower traps and it can restrict our breathing. Another restriction we might feel is not being able to bind. And this might be tightness through the joint capsule, maybe stiffness through the pec. Maybe we're unable to position our scapula in such a way to be able to bind.
[00:13:57] It could be limitation in our thoracic rotation. So how much the upper spine wants to rotate upward. And another pattern we might feel our impingement y feelings. So it might feel inflamed, compressed. This doesn't always actually come from impingement, but sometimes it is the scapula not being able to move in its full range. Of motion, Maybe weakness in the rotator, tighter cuff. Maybe it's overuse, it's just tired, maybe poor load management. So we're not recruiting all of the muscles to help bear the load. So there are a lot of different ways you might feel pain in this area, and there are also a lot of ways to fix it and find some better function through your shoulders.
[00:14:41] And we can find this through strength and mobility, through control, and through load management. So I'll name a few priorities for mobility in the shoulder. One is thoracic spine extension and rotation.
[00:14:55] So this is being able to open up the chest. Think heart openers, and being able to rotate through this area. So think twists. So we might practice these things, but alongside that, we might use myofascial release or foam roll or upper back. We might do things like thread the needle. And I like doing thread the needle in a held way in yoga, but I also like doing it in more of a dynamic way. So opening and closing the threading of the needle, inhaling to open, exhaling to close, repeating that several times. Maybe it's open books, too. So that's coming to a recline twist, taking both of your palms together at one side and then opening up the arm across the chest to the other side and then repeating that a few times. So that's a good way to get into that area and find a little bit more mobility. We can also find mobility through the pecs, through the front of the chest. So maybe we're doing that with a door frame stretch. So that means taking the forearm or hand to a door frame and then gently walking your body to the opposite way until you find a gentle stretch there. So it's not meant to be aggressive or to yank and the ribs stack over the hips. Here. You might also find something like downward dog against a wall and melt the chest with your breath not through, forcing it down so you place the hands on the wall, hips back, let the chest melt, and stay there for a few breaths. You might also mobilize the lats, especially if it's hard to get arms overhead without the ribs flaring. So you might do something like taking the arm overhead, catching the elbow with the opposite hand, and moving to the side. You might also find child's pose variations where the scapula can upwardly rotate, where you're not drawing the shoulder blades down the back, so you're letting the shoulders lift. Um, and I really like doing that through later bending. So taking child's pose, walking the hands to one side, stacking one hand on Top of the other, breathing there for a few moments, and then walking the hands to the other side. And if the back of the shoulder is tight, maybe it's restricting. Things like binding or eagle pose. You can cross one arm over the chest and catch it with the opposite arm and take a few breaths there. We're not looking for it to be aggressive or end range, but you'll cross till you can feel it and then take a few deep breaths. So those are a few mobility exercises that you can do to free up the shoulders. There are also some strength priorities. These are things that aren't always incorporated within a yoga practice. So you might go to a teacher who likes to incorporate strengthening into the yoga practice. Or it's something that you can cross train with. So you can strengthen your serratus anterior or again those kind of armpit bandas I've talked about through things like scapular pushups. So you can take a kneeling position or a plank position and then just mobilize through your scapula. So you'll draw your shoulder blades together and then press them apart, keeping the core nice and strong. As you find that movement. You can also find that just in tabletop to get the feeling of it first before going into something like a forearm plank or a plank. You can also do something like a wall slide, where you're finding a cactus shape toward a wall, placing your hands on the wall, taking your shoulder blades apart. And as you gently press your hands into the wall, you're sliding them all the way up, up and then back down to the starting position. And you'll do that maybe five or 10 times, maybe for two or three sets. So those are great ways to start to strengthen the serratus. You can also start to strengthen the rotator cuff more. I like doing external rotation with a band. That means that there will be like a stretchy band that is connected to a wall or a pole. You stand with one side of the body facing the band. The other arm will take the band into the fist, the elbow bent and then rotate out and away from the body. And you'll go back and forth several times. You can also do side lying external rotations. So you'd lie on your side and in your top arm you'd use like a light dumbbell.
[00:19:12] Keep the elbow bent and rotate the dumbbell upward and then downward, keeping the elbow pinned to your side. You can start to strengthen your lower trap to aid in upward rotation of the shoulders. Maybe by doing, ey wise, you can take two light dumbbells or you can Use a stretchy band and step on the band holding the handles in each hand and take the arms and make a Y shape overhead and then take it back down to the original position, Y shape down, almost like the first movement in the ymca. You might also want to strengthen the triceps to help with pushing, to help with things like chaturanga.
[00:19:51] Incline pushups can be a good way to build this strength. So that might be a pushup against a wall or on a bench. So you have hands on the wall or on like a weight bench or something like that, or a box in front of you and you do tricep push ups or chaturangas up and down, over and over. And you might graduate that eventually to like a knee down, tricep push up and then eventually with knees up. When I'm doing these types of strengthening movements, I like to make sure that the eccentric so the lowering control part of the movement is nice and slow and that the breath stays nice and steady under load. This helps build strength and also mind body connection. And I want to say also that it's important to manage your load. So if your shoulders are feeling irritated, we don't want to continually inflame and irritate them. You might want to reduce the volume of chaturangas or arm balances for a temporary basis to let them heal. Maybe you're swapping for knees down options, incline work or slower work. Know that it's perfectly okay to rest that. Especially if our movement is non functional. We don't want to just keep irritating that spot. We want to let it heal and then take some time to rehab. Now that's a lot of information on shoulder anatomy, maybe restrictions that you feel, ways to mobilize and strengthen these patterns. Let's talk about how we apply this to yoga.
[00:21:26] So if parts of this episode have gone over your head with the anatomical speak, this is where it might all start to come together and make sense for you. First, let's talk about downward facing dog. We might cue something like press the floor away with your hands and feel your shoulder blades glide up and around your ribs. So we are allowing for upward rotation here. Instead of cranking our shoulders down, we're letting our ribs be soft but not flared, allowing the neck to be long. I'll also add that for students who feel very tight in this pose and we often see like a rounded upper back and the hips drawing forward instead of back in this position to bend the knees and really tilt your hips up and back and that will help create more ease and space through the thoracic spine, more functionality through the shoulders as well. You might also place blocks under your hands, and that can be a really nice way to gain that space for students who are quite mobile. You might actually come out of the posture a little bit, so you might make it look a little bit more like student number one that I talked about with the rounded back. And then draw back just a little bit until you find a lengthened spine. And you have to hold your muscles in place to get there, because otherwise the chest will just keep dipping down toward the floor and you'll be hanging out in your ligaments. Let's also talk about plank pose.
[00:22:52] In plank pose, you'll want to spread across the upper back and engage through the serratus anterior. So there's a slight protraction of your shoulder blades, meaning they're spreading apart. There's a little bit of a doming through the upper back. And then you're going to squeeze into your armpits, almost like you're squeezing a ball or a big marble in your armpits. You'll also want to make sure that your shoulders are stacked over your wrist and that your elbow pits or those soft inner creases of the elbows are pointing forward. Ish. So there's a bit of an external rotation through the upper arm bones. And if the joints want to over extend, meaning like if they're wanting to bend the opposite way. For people with a lot of mobility or hypermobility, you might need to feel as though you're bending the elbows slightly and then engage the muscles around it. Now we'll talk about chaturanga first. Only go as low as you can control. So if you start to feel the posture slipping out of your control or moving too fast, that means stay a little bit higher. Also make sure that shoulders don't dip below the elbows, which will help keep the shoulder heads from dumping forward. So you want to keep the chest nice and broad, collarbones wide and not going down too far. Sometimes I'll place a strap just above my elbows or I'll do it for students. And the strap would be shoulder distance apart and you'd move into your chaturanga. And that's going to limit how far you can move down. So that's a really good way to test, like, what is my end range there? And you might modify your chaturanga as well, with knees down or by lowering just a few inches with knees raised while you continue to build strength. Any posture where arms are overhead or arms by the ears, make sure the ribs are stacked over the pelvis that you are reaching long, that you're allowing your shoulder blade to rotate upward instead of trying to jam it back down.
[00:24:50] And if it pinches in any way, you can back off. So things like cactus arms are a really great alternative. Or taking hands to heart. This might be an invitation as well to mobilize your thoracic spine more. We talked about some exercises you can do for that earlier, like foam rolling. And you might need to strengthen your upward rotators. And we talked about the external rotation exercises a little bit earlier as well. When we're talking about binds, you'll want to warm up with thoracic rotation. So rotating through the spine, things like thread the needle, as well as with pec mobility. So working on opening up through the chest. And you don't want to force pain. Binds are always completely optional in a practice. They're not worth hurting your shoulders for. I also love using straps for binds as well. That typically involves holding a strap in the back hand, let's say inside angle, and then reaching down with the front arm to catch the tail of the strap. That way you don't have to bring the hands all the way together or hold onto the wrist. So I have a quick mini assessment for you if you're wondering maybe if any of these patterns are showing up in your body. The first one is an arms overhead test. So can you place your arms all the way overhead and get your biceps by your ears without your ribs flaring forward and without pain? So take a moment to notice that also. So you can try a wall slide test. So we talked about this one earlier, but you would face a wall, place your hands onto the wall and then slide the arms all the way up and then all the way down. Almost like you're making like a snow angel or doing a slow motion jumping jack. But with elbows bent, can your scapula glide without you shrugging? So without totally lifting your whole shoulder complex, the third test you can do is plank tolerance. Can you hold a plank for 20 or 30 seconds without your neck taking over? And you can do these and just use them as information. They're not a way to judge ourselves, but maybe to point out areas that could strengthen more or that could benefit from a greater sense of mobility. So that you can feel more freedom and integration in your yoga practice and in your movement journey and in your life. So do know that shoulder health isn't about perfect alignment, but it's about capacity, about coordination and awareness. I will list out the different mobility and strengthening drills in the show notes here, and I invite you to choose one mobility drill and one strength drill to try three times a week for a month and see how it changes your downward dog, your plank, and your daily posture in general. And if you're a yoga teacher listening to this, my invitation to you would be to start cueing function more than aesthetics. So instead of looking for a very specific shape, how is the body moving? How is it functioning? What patterns are we looking to help cultivate, et cetera? So maybe that's like, is the scapula on the ribs? Is it moving freely? Are the ribs stacked? Is the range of motion controlled? So I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a lot, and it's complex, but so are our shoulders. Shoulders. And I hope you love your shoulders. I love your shoulders. And I would love for you to be able to enjoy your life, to practice yoga, to be able to function well for a long, long time.
[00:28:32] So thank you so much for listening. If you'd like more anatomy deep dives, let me know. They're fun for me, and I love doing the research. All right, have a beautiful week. Om Shanti Om. Peace.
