The shoulders can be complicated to figure out how to treat because they are THE most mobile part of your body. There are actually 4 joints that are part of the shoulder girdle, but we’ll keep things simple for our purposes.
Let’s think of the shoulders as the shelf for the head and the neck. If the shelf is angled, or tilted forward, the weight of the head and the neck will put extra strain on all the muscles that support that upper part of the body.
In our culture, everything is in front of us so we need opposing movements to strengthen what’s behind us.
I’ll add one more piece of the equation which is the ribs. When the shoulders are rounded forward, it compresses the ribs which doesn’t allow us to use our full breath capacity and can also increase anxiety.
This posture forces us to use accessory breathing muscles to get oxygen into our system. These smaller muscles lift the upper ribs by our collar bones but it’s a lot of effort for not a lot of air. The unfortunate thing about this response of the body to keep us alive, is that it puts our system into fight or flight and floods it with cortisol.
We’re not running from bears or trying to stay alive, we’re just sitting at a desk and staring at a screen more than our body was designed to. All is not lost and I have 2 very doable exercises in this video to level the shelf, stabilize the shoulders and give more access to the diaphragm which is our strongest breathing muscle.
Esther Gokhale wrote a book after researching other cultures and old art to understand why our spines have changed over the years. It’s called 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back and I highly recommend for simple, doable exercises.
If you’ve noticed that only one of your shoulders seems to be affected and the other tends to be fine, I suggest doing the exercises in the videos from this blog and this one too. Pay attention to what feels tighter or challenging and keep up with that. Many times, we’re simply stronger on one side or in one action, so our body needs balance.