it’s not just working out. It's building a foundation for a better life.
Click on the image to watch the video.
The key to transforming your life is to make conscious choices. These conscious choices help you manage stress and lead a better life. Check out this video on some great tips and reasons why and how to take your life head-on.
it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.
Find out more @
Anterior pelvic tilt, or duck butt, is a postural problem that can lead to a lot of physiological issues, especially in your lower back. Anterior pelvic tilt disorders require understanding why you have the anterior pelvic tilt and corrective exercises for anterior pelvic tilt. Tune in to find out both.
Click on the image to watch
Anterior pelvic tilt, otherwise known as duck butt. Now as funny as that may be, the anterior pelvic tilt is actually not funny. It’s a pathological posture problem that can lead to a lot of issues. So if you’re interested in finding out more or you have an anterior pelvic tilt, they want to see what can happen with one and how to get out of one. Then stay tuned. How you doing? I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m a Soma therapist and a Soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years and I had an interior pelvic tilt and it was one of the main causes as to why I got an L 4 L 5 disc bulge and sciatic pain on my left side. But nowhere along the process with the trainers and athletic trainers before the injury or the doctors and therapists after the injury, did anybody bring up that?
That’s the reason why I had it. That’s because all these people are symptom-based professions. They want to cure a symptom, not the cause. The cause. One of the causes was the anterior pilic tilt. I was even taught to squat by sticking my butt out and looking up to keep myself nice and tall. I was taught that it’s totally stupid. So I want to talk about this topic and more in a holistic fashion because it’s not just about the symptom or the one little goal you have, it’s about holistic the cause. What contributes to all the things that you want to accomplish in your life. So if you want to hear more, subscribe, if you’d like the video, give me a thumbs up and share with your friends. An anterior pelvic tilt is when your pelvis tilts forward more than normal and stays there. So your pelvis is naturally tilts forward, kind of dally forward and down.
Normally an anterior pillow tilt is if it gets pulled too far forward and can’t pull back, back to normal. The most stable position we have for our pelvis is quaded hands and knees on all fours. But since we have to be biped walk around our feet that a pelvis is always going to be in that slightly tilted forward position and even without an anterior pivot tilt, the forces for my body ascending, descending and intrinsic forces accumulate more down toward the lower back top of the pelvis. It isn’t bad if everything’s in place doing a job. It’s bad if it becomes pathological like an anterior pelvic tilt. Our body was designed to allow forces to attenuate, to disperse as we move around in life. So when we’re walking, taking steps or reaching over to grab something or the forces from gravity come down to us where somebody bumps into us, those forces that happen whenever we do things should move through our body in a pretty fluid way.
It’s called tensegerity. Tensegerity is by Buckminster Fuller who is an architect. And then a bunch of really smart people saw that tensegerity was also the body and they said, okay, this is biotensegerity. So that’s what we are. So that allows us to disperse the forces properly. You can see here in this shot that tensegeruity has a bunch of wonderful things that it can accomplish. It’s very effective structure to use, not in our body but also in architecture. But the main one I want to talk about here, which applies to this video is that the load produced on the structure is distributed throughout the structure. A tensegerity structure. Our body will continue to function even if part of this structure becomes compromised. So I can have one little part of my soft tissue become tight, weak, or stupid, and my body will continue to move.
It’s called compensation at the beginning. Compensation’s not a bad thing. It allows our whole body to continue to move. When one part’s not taken away, we we’re not a Christmas tree light. We don’t take one out and all thing shuts down. We can still move. So that’s great, but it’s not great because you continue to move so you think, eh, nothing’s wrong, but it is right. And now over time that compensation accumulates then activates another area to go down, then another area, then another area you’ll keep moving, but eventually the accumulation of compensations will become pathological and permanent. Let’s take a beat here so you can digest all the information I gave you and check in. Do you have anterior perfect tilt and if so, what are you doing for it? Just let me know in the comments. Now I want you to stay tuned because if you’re not doing anything for it, I want to let you know what could possibly happen and then let you know what you could do to get yourself out.
An anterior pelvic tilt in general is caused when the muscles in front of the pelvis, the cell as and all its hip flexor friends pull the hips, the ileum too far forward in conjunction the muscles in the back, the glute max, your back muscles, your hamstrings are either too weak or too tight or combination two that caused your pelvis to move forward. It’s generally caused, it’s generally a progressive thing, excuse me, and it’s caused by sitting down too much and not doing anything about it and a bad structure and gravity line, meaning you can’t hold yourself in place in your four degree cone. And generally if you lead too far forward it starts to cause that. But there’s also a genetic component. Some people are born with their butt sticking out more just in general. Well now for you it is not going to be a slow progressive thing.
It’s going to go quicker because you’re already going in that direction just from birth. You have like a genetic thing. So you have to have more intention placed to not go really pathological. So if you end up in this anterior, if it tilt whether they’re fast or slow, you can put yourself in a bad position. So now those forces I talked that should go through your body attenuate. Nice thing. They start to accumulate more at that area, namely the lower back and SI joint and pelvic area and hip area. They start to go there and they start to produce more force and stay, which means you lead to a bunch of bad things. I’ll give an example. So if I have that interior pelvic tilt and my pelvis is tilting forward while on the top of my pelvis connected to my sacrum, which is part of the pelvis is L5.
L5 stands for lumbar fifth. The lumbar is your part of your spine. So I’ve taken that part of my spine and it goes forward. Now, when it goes forward more, right, it’s going forward more than normal. That means it’s out of place. But because L 4 is above it, then L3, then L 2 and L1, they also go with it. But then because your body doesn’t want to fall down, they overcorrect themselves by coming backwards. Now you have lordosis. So lordotic curve means you have a good lower back. Lordosis means it’s a pathology. Now you have, well now you should have had a bunch of nice spaces between your joints. Now you don’t. They should have been sitting on each other a certain direction, but now they’re not. That’s going to leave the door open for stuff like a disc bulge, a herniation, a prolapse, some arthritis at the joint or in your facet joints, stenosis, what else?
Fun things. More fun things relate to your spine because you have an anterior pelvic tilt and because you’ve taught your body to do that, because you’re either teaching yourself consciously or subconscious or unconsciously, you’ve taught it unconsciously to be that position, it’s still learned to stay there. Now all those tendons, ligaments, muscles, they’ve been taught to do bad things. So now they’re having bad education and they’re going to keep doing that bad education unless you retrain it to do something different. It’s imperative that you train the muscles and the tendons and ligaments. It’s imperative that you tell ’em to do something different because the structure of our body dictates how well you function. Function obviously means how well you move around in space, but it also mean a lot more. So with this anterior pivot tilt, you can also end up with hip problems. You can end up with visceral problems in your pelvis. You can have problems having intercourse, voiding your system, a bunch of urethra type stuff. All that is within your pelvis. And if I put my pelvis out of place, who knows what’s going to happen. It depends on your weakest link. Probably better idea not to wait to see what happens if it’s out of place. Probably better to start training that system to go away. So what do you do? Well, keep it basic. If
Those in the front of the pelvis are too tight, you stretch ’em. If the muscles in the back are too weak and too tight, you strengthen and stretch ’em. But you don’t just do it with the muscle. Your body doesn’t work as a collection of muscles just operating independently. They operate together via the fascia that connects all of our body. So we train something. So let’s say I want to stretch my SOAs. I want to stretch my SOAs because it’s part of my hip flexor complex that also attaches to leg into my spine. Very important muscle. I’m going to have a video on it. I think last week I did very important muscle. So I’m going to stretch that SOAs. I’m going to stretch it to elongate it, but I also want to stretch it with all the fascia connections. If I just work in that muscle and I don’t work in the fascia, it might feel good, but then the next day your body goes back to the same position.
It was because you haven’t trained the fascia, which is part of the intelligent part of the body to do something different. So you have to stretch the SOAs and all the hip flexors and maybe even strengthen ’em. Maybe they’re weak. You have to strengthen fascially those back posterior muscles and then stretch those back muscles. Fascially. It’s impaired that you do this in a holistic manner. If your body functions as one, you need to train it as one. The best techniques I’ve found so far are osteopathic etiology exercises, right? So they take the segmental muscle, say the SOAs, they go, okay, I’m going to train or stretch the SOAs. But they also think, okay, it’s attached these things. So there’s a posture for each position to make sure that it’s working. The muscle and the chain by far so far in my 30 years the best.
So if you are in your twenties or thirties, I implore you to start something like this. Now, I wish I had done this back in the day. I had to wait until I got hurt, until I found something like this. Had I done this back in the day, like I hope you do. And I continued to function at my highest level while preventing myself from getting injuries. You see, when you do this type of program, you keep your structure in place, which means you prevent injuries, but you also increase productivity, which means you can work harder, you can lift more, run faster, do jumpy jacks, whatever, flips more. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, ski better. You can do it better and more effectively because it’s structure. Your body is more aware, it’s more balanced, it’s stronger, it’s more flexible. Everything’s working as one’s very, very effective. If you haven’t done this in your forties, fifties, maybe sixties, even seventies, and you have a pathology and anterior pivotal tilt in this case, then this needs to be your main program because until you bring that back into place, you’re compromising your body because we’re only as strong as our weakest link and relative to this
Video, the anterior pelvic tilt is the weakest link and whatever happens from that. So exercise is the number one way to do this. Not general exercise, not going to whatever, whatever. And just doing basic squats and pull-ups and pushups and or yoga and Pilates is specific exercises that can be used in conjunction with whatever program you want. So the best exercise I’ve found, like I said, are osteopathic type exercises. If you want to learn more, then I’d be happy to help. You can join my private Facebook group. You just click on the link in description, answer some information, agree to the rules and you’re in. And now even an interactive way to interact with me to ask questions, to see my little mini trainings, masterclasses, my big trainings where you participate with me in theory and also in exercises. Great way to do that or I have a free ebook is how to Get out of Paying, get Mobile and Live the Life of Your Dreams.
There’s four steps to that. Again, in description, just click on it, put in your information, you get instant access, or you can reach out to me personally by using the description. I always do that by using the link in the description that goes to my calendar link. You can choose a time that works for you and we can talk. So I hope this is helpful. Again, if you like this, please give it a thumbs up. It tells YouTube that it’s good and lets other people see it, and then also share it. And don’t forget to subscribe. Take care.
it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.
Find out more @
The iliopsoas muscle, or psoas, is a really important muscle that can also cause a lot of problems. Illipsosas can cause bursitis pain, hip pain, pelvic dysfunction and low back pain. And just looking up iliopsoas stretches or iliopsoas strengthening exercises wont give you the full view of what to do. So tune in to learn more about the iliopsoas muscle and how best to work with it.
Click on the image to watch
Is your iliopsoas, or some people just call it the psoas, tight or weak and causing you issues? Chances are, if it is, what’s traditionally given to people and what you find on the internet, which is basically the same thing, is not the most effective. I want you to stay tuned because the psoas, iliopsoas is much more complex than you think, and so a lot more can be done to it than what’s traditionally given to you. Greetings, I’m Ekemba Sooh, I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness and I’m a Soma therapist and Soma trainer, and I’ve been in this field for about 30 years.
Within that 30 years, like 17, 18 of them, I’ve been studying underneath the osteopathic model. Once I started to study under this model, I realized there’s much more to the body than what’s traditionally being shown to people. There’s a lot more different directions the muscles go, a lot more connections that we’ve ever seen, which means there’s a lot more ways to work with the body. It’s called holistic. Everything is interdependent and interconnected. We want to think about how the body functions so we can train it and treat it best. That’s what I talk about it in this channel, holistic. If you want to hear more about this, then subscribe to the channel. If you like this video, please give a thumbs up. It tells the algorithm that it’s good so more people can get benefit to watch it and don’t forget to share it with your friends.
The psoas muscle is actually called the iliopsoas muscle. Iliac is a part of it. There’s a bunch of different attachments, not just from your hip into your spine, there’s a lot more. You have a psoas part which is attached to three places. You have your lesser trochanter, and then you have at the middle of the spine at the body we say anterior medial, anterior meaning front medial means middle, and then you have the posterior meaning back and lateral to the side. That’s three. Then you have an iliac portion, which is in the hip. You have a minor part toward the down low and a major part up high, and then you have a little tiny muscle or even there’s a ligament called your psoas minor.
So you can see there’s a lot of different places that you can work with and the psoas has a lot of different jobs. Those jobs need to be performed properly. It can’t be performed properly if it’s tight or weak. So you may have things like an overarching of the back. You may have also your pelvis moving forward. You may have compression of your spine. You may have your hip moving in bad place like external or internal rotation. It could throw off a lot of things. In the osteopathic model, we say the psoas is a true tensegrity muscle because it connects the leg, the hip, and the spine. It connects all three. That’s why it’s super important. Now, when you search around for the psoas, you find more basic information anatomically and you may find some interesting information about spirit and stuff. I can’t talk about that. I’ve never studied about it. I guess it’s true.
I’m here to talk about more of the physiological components of the psoas. It’s really good to know the different places the psoas goes just like every muscle, they go a lot more places than people really think, because if I know which way muscle goes, I know which way I can strengthen it or stretch it because I want to see where the fibers go. Okay, the fibers go here. Whether I can go this way to strengthen it, I can move away from it to stretch it at a basic level. If it has these different attachments, then you need to think about the different places it attaches to and the different ways that the muscle fibers go.
But it’s more important to think about the muscle in terms of Hill’s Muscle Model. Hill’s Muscle Model says you need three components. You need the muscle, you need the fascia, you need the ligament or joint. You need these three aspects to work properly so it functions properly. It’s not just about working the muscle. In all muscles you have an epimysium, a perimysium, and an endomysium. Those are fancy names for fascia that goes between the muscle fibers and muscles. Those muscle fibers and muscle fascia go out toward the outside and connect to the muscle ligament. That ligament generally connects to a bone, but it’s not the bone, it’s the periosteum. Again, another fancy name for the fascia that surrounds the bone, which means if those layers of fascia go out to ligaments, which connect to the fascia and the bone, that means it connects everywhere, and that’s what your fascia does. It connects everywhere. Like you have one fascia that connects a thousand different places like a spiderweb.
When you think about the psoas, you think, oh, well, if it connects in that chain, then that chain must be down to the leg, up to the pelvis, and up to the spine because those are the three components of the psoas. The fascia iliaca, again, another fancy name for fascia, that surrounds all that connects to a lot more. Most importantly, it can connect to pelvic fascia. If you have a tight muscle, a tight psoas, you can have pelvic issues. It connects to the spine, but also connects to very importantly all the internal organs [inaudible 00:05:23], which means, again, if you have a tight or weak psoas, yes you have a tight, weak psoas, but you can also have some visceral problems. That’s the most important part and that’s the way to view this holistically.
Are you struggling with psoas or iliopsoas issues? Well, what are you doing? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to have a conversation with you and I want you to stay tuned and I’ll go through what people traditionally do for the psoas and what I feel is a little more important to do. A big thing people do is when they have psoas issues is they think they have to go straight to stretching, that’s not totally true and I’m going to get to that in a minute. They think that because it feels tight and it could be, but it could also be weak. If you look on the interweb, the big thing you see for the psoas is this posture, and you see it in physical therapy and you also see it in yoga. I’m not quite sure why you see it in both places, they’re two different aspects, but it’s the same thing. They’ll kneel, they put their hand here, they arch their back and they slide forward because they think, “Oh, I’m just stretching my psoas, this part.”
That’s from that basic anatomy and basic biomechanics, basic, right here. It doesn’t attach here as we went through before. They attach to all those different places and it has all different things you need to do. When you do this position it doesn’t take into consideration a lot of different things. First and foremost, one of the psoas’ jobs is to externally rotate the leg. If I want to strengthen something, I go in the action. I’ll go in external rotation. If I want to stretch it, I’m going to go opposite, which is internal rotation. In this posture you can see the foot’s right behind the butt. That’s neutral. I have to go, my foot wide, so my leg internally rotates. That’s the first issue, just basic issue.
The second issue is they’re arching our back and sliding forward well. The psoas again, part of its normal position, if it’s not pathological, is to keep a nice lordotic lumbar curve. Well, now that’s an action. Now I’m enhancing the action as I kneel and go forward so I’m not doing the opposite action. I’m doing the action and more into it. First I’m not stretching it, I’m sliding forward and I’m not doing it. I would need to tuck my pelvis and flatten my back and get tall because again, the so job is to stick your butt out. An opposite would be to tuck your butt. The psoas’ job then also is to keep your spine pulled together, co-optation, so I want to get tall. Those are some basic reasons why this stretch does not work.
Some issues I have with that is that a lot of people have spinal problems, and so if I’m sliding forward like that one, I’m not doing anything for my psoas properly. Two, I’m compressing my spine more as I go back. If I have a disc herniation, that herniation can go, well, it normally goes for a lot of people backing out posterolateral, but because it’s a ball, because I have pressure on a ball, it’s called Pascal’s Law, that pressure can go omnidirectional, which means I kneel and slide forward that pressure could also go forward. It’s a potential. So that’s one issue I have with that.
The main issue though is that it’s not done fascially. Again, you just think about the muscle in a basic position, which means I want to make sure that I stretch fascially. To do so I need to make sure that I have those opposite biomechanical actions. I talked about, internal rotation of the hip, pelvis tucked nice and tall. But I also want to think about, oh, it’s connected to the rest of my body so you need to know about the biomechanics fascially of the body and do stuff to put tension throughout the chain of the body to stretch not only the psoas but the iliopsoas. Then you think about what different directions do I need to move my trunk and pelvis or leg or whatever to get those different attachments of the psoas? Because, again, if there’s all those different attachments, you can stretch them differently, not just one way.
If I want to start working the SOAs more holistically with all the different factors it needs, then first what we talk about is we literally stretch the iliopsoas in all different directions myofascially. That’s the best way I’ve found to normalizing the lengthening and the balance in the body. We also normalize the fascia by itself. You can do that by getting treated. You find a therapist like myself who knows how to work with the fascia and understands that that fascia iliaca has a normal amount of torsion twisting, but if it’s twisted too much like a towel, then I can’t pull it apart. Grab a towel and twist it as hard as you can and try and pull it. It doesn’t move. Untwist it, say halfway and pull, you can see it moves a little bit. That’s the same idea because again, that fascia envelops the muscle and goes within the muscle. If it’s too twisted, it won’t work properly. First I normalize the fascia.
Then also I think about Hill’s Muscle Model, and I think, oh, look, I need to strengthen the psoas so I have a muscle. You can only stretch a muscle if it’s there. I want to strengthen the psoas again in different directions, not just one way. Now I’m working with the psoas in all these different directions, now you’re working holistically, and now you think about the other areas the psoas is attached to and stretch those. Not the areas of the endpoint to the psoas, but if it attaches to the spine, okay, if you attaches to the spine, what else is there? My transverse spinalis, my longissimus, my iliocostalis, my lat, stuff like that. You work out because muscles don’t work alone. They work in conjunction with other muscles and other fascia. You build out a program to not only work with what you need to work with, but everything around it that can help it work.
I want to leave you with something to help you out. As we know, the psoas has a bunch of different attachments, connects fascially, a bunch of different ways you need to strengthen it and stretch it. I’m going to give you one little nugget here. Myofascial stretching is fantastic for balancing your body, but the one thing that I like better to lengthen the muscle is to do postural stretching. Postural stretching is to get into a posture and hang out, to not be active. With the psoas, you can do that. Again, do you do this? If you feel you’re comfortable with it, I’m not prescribing it to you at all, but you’re going to sit on something, as you can see in this little video I’m going to show you, on the edge of a bench or your bed or a treatment table like I’m doing, and you would lean back.
Now, when you lean back, you pick one side to work with, and so you hold the opposite knee and let that other knee drop down. Then you just hang out there because a postural stretch. There’s no activity besides get into a posture and hanging out. Allow that to hang as long as you want and then switch sides and do the other side. If you have a predominantly tight side, do that one first. Allow yourself to sit in this position for as long as you can handle it on that side. When you’re done, you gently switch by bringing that leg up and switch in a hold of the knee, and then you do the other side. Do that and have good luck.
That’s just a little bit of information on how to think about working with the psoas, but also the body differently. I could go on a lot longer about all this, about different biomechanics and ways of move and stuff like that, but this is not a lecture. This is to help you understand more about the work with it. If you want to understand more, then I got some resources for you. You can join my private Facebook group. In the description below there’s a link. Just click on the link, answer a few questions, agree to the terms and you’re in. It’s a dynamic, interactive way to work with me to find out more about how to work with your body holistically.
Or, if you want to find out more about all these different rules and ways to address a body that I’ve been talking about in this video, then have a free resource. It’s called To Get Mobile, Get Out of Pain, and Live the Life of Your Dreams. It’s four steps, but it talks about these different rules and the way things are connected and how to think about the body so you get a better view of what I’m talking about. Not a total view, but a better view. Then you can reread it again so you can get more and more knowledge. If you like what you heard and you want to work with your body this way, then reach out for a consultation. In the description below, you’ll find a link for the consultation. You click on it, you’ll be taken to my Calendly link. You find time that’s good for you, you pick it and we meet and talk.
I hope this is informational. If you like this information, I’ll make more videos on the psoas about this. Please give it a thumbs up if you like it and share it with your friends and I’ll see you next week.
it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.
Find out more @
How to Make and Stick with a Commitment to Health and Wellness
People often ask me how I make a commitment to my health and wellness and stick to it.
Well, first, and I’ll just be honest, I am anal-retentive. I like following things to get myself better and keep myself going. 🤪
But the main thing I do is view it as taking care of a relationship. And like all relationships, you can’t just take take take, or you’ll be single, so you have to listen and nurture it.
Life gets hectic, and it’s all too easy to place our own well-being at the bottom of the never-ending to-do list. But here’s the truth, and I want you to really hear this:
It’s not easier to do nothing. It’s not cheaper. It’s not more convenient. And it’s definitely not selfish to invest in yourself.
Your body wants to live this wonderful life that you do, but it needs TLC. And TLC is not forcing your body to get somewhere; it’s listening to it and giving it what it needs.
Now, the problem people run into is that they don’t view it as a priority, and then when they realize they need to do something, they “just want it to happen right away.”
Imagine if somebody treated you like that in a relationship. 💥
The secret to making a lasting commitment to your well-being begins with one fundamental question:
𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘺?
𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦?
Before you start planning what you’re going to do for your health… and where… and how much it will cost, and how much time it will take… BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, YOU MUST KNOW WHO YOU WANT TO BE AND WHATS YOUR WHY.
It’s what will get you started, and it’s what will keep you going.
So, I want you to think about this. It may come to mind right away. Maybe it takes a few minutes of reflection or discussion with a special someone.
WHATEVER IT TAKES, take your time with this step!
This is an empowering and calming step. Now, you have a foundation to work from to search for how to get there. As opposed to not knowing, continuing “random acts of movement,” or expecting somebody else to do it or fix you.😤
Work will still be done, and you will get frustrated. But as Eckhart Tolle says “𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦 𝑖𝑡𝑠 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑝 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤.”
And if you choose to walk this empowered path, you will learn and grow into a life more significant than you can imagine.
it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.
Find out more @
Having strong, mobile shoulders is important for your entire body. But when you search for information for shoulder pain, shoulder impingement, shoulder strengthening, or best rotator cuff strengthening routines, you see much of the same information. Well, tune in to learn about all the different places you need to train and the 2 most important muscles that must be in your routine.
Click on the image to watch the video.
When people are working with their shoulders and they’re trying to develop strength, mobility, or maybe trying to do some corrective exercise, or get rid of pain or injuries, they forget a bunch of really important factors about all the different joints that are required for shoulder strength, mobility, and stability. They focus on just the shoulder, and that’s not all you need.
And there’s two really important muscles within this complex that people almost generally never work. So I want you stay tuned. We’re going to talk about all these joints and these two really important muscles that you need to work.
Greetings to all. I’m Ekemba Sooh. I’m the owner of Solcore Fitness. I’ve been in this field for almost 30 years, actually I think it’s now 30 years, and I’m Soma therapist and Soma trainer. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s kind of like a physical therapist, but more, and it’s all underneath the osteopathic paradigm of which I’ve been studying for I think about 17, maybe 18 years.
Osteopath is all about holistic by treating the body as it was designed as a one interdependent, interconnected being that needs to function properly so everything I talk about is within this holistic paradigm.
So if you’d like to hear more stuff about being holistic with your body, with exercises and stretches, I want you to subscribe this channel. If you like this video, please give a thumb’s up. Let’s the algorithm know that it’s a good video so others can watch. And then don’t forget to share it with your friends.
So as I alluded to at the beginning, your shoulder is not just your glenohumeral joint. Glenohumeral is this. Glen means the opening in the shoulder blade, the glenoid, and humeral means your arm bone. Those two together form the glenohumeral joint. So when people talk about the shoulder, that’s basically what they’re talking about. They talk about that one area.
But there’s five. These are the five joints of the shoulder. They’re also called the five joints of disease. It’s the guy who found it. Don’t ask me to spell it because I can’t, the five joints of disease, okay? So if I got two shoulders, it means I got 10 joints I have to work with, okay?
So I’m going to go slow here. The groupings of these shoulder joints fall into two. One has two classifications, the other one has three, total of five. The first one with two is your scapula, humeral group. Again, scapula means shoulder blade, humeral, arm, okay? So if your glenohumeral joint as one of them, then if your subdeltoid joint as a second, that’s the first section. That’s two of the five.
The second section is your scapular girdle or classifications. There’s three underneath there. Your scapular girdle is also part of your cervical thoracic diaphragm. It’s one of the four diaphragms. The other three are the cranial, thoracic, and pelvic. So this scapular girdle one, the first one, hope I get this right, is your SCCC, your sternal, chondral, costal, clavicular joint right here. The second one is your AC joint, and the last one underneath your shoulder blade is your serratic joint. Okay. So we got the five now.
It’s important to think about all five because all five work together to make your shoulder strong and mobile, what you need. Your shoulders should be very mobile. The way it’s designed, it should be very mobile. But if you have something off in these five joints, then you’re going to have something off in your shoulders. Because these five joints on each side, the 10 total, they’re kind of like a hammock right on your shoulder, right? We want to keep this nice and balanced. So if I’ve got something off in my SCCC on my left side and it causes me to have some sort of thing like that, right? Well, it’s going to throw off the other side, too. If I get thrown off on my shoulder joints, then I end up with decreased strength, mobility, pain and injury. And the pain and injury doesn’t have to be from the side that you have the issues. So again, if I have an issue here at my SCCC, I could end up having pain here. I see it all the time.
Along these five joints that I just went on about, you also need muscle. You need muscle to help keep things in place and to move your body properly. So the important muscles of the shoulder are, first and foremost, your rotator cuff muscles. Your rotator cuff muscles are actually part of your shoulder capsule. So you can look at a picture of their shoulder capsule and you can see like the infraspinatus, supraspinatus. They’re actually part of the capsule. They actually go into it. It’s like a thickening of the capsule.
On top, literally and figuratively, is your deltoid. That’s your main shoulder muscle. You have a front, middle and the back part that work almost independently of each other, but also together.
Now, some other muscles people don’t think about, first and foremost, is your bicep. Your bicep, as suggest, has two muscles, your long head and short head. Your short head attaches to your coracoid process right here, which is part of your shoulder blade. Your longhead bicep attaches to the top of your glenoid on your shoulder blade. So again, your glenoid is a space where the humerus, the arm, goes in and rotates. So on top of it, your longhead bicep attaches.
On the back of your arm, you have your tricep. The main one is your longhead tricep that attaches right below the glenoid so that longhead bicep and longhead tricep work together to help manage the scapula.
And quick note, if you go get shoulder surgery, especially a rotator cuff surgery, a lot of times what’s done is they repair the supraspinatus because it’s become too weak and frayed. But then they also cut the longhead bicep and attach it back into the humerus. They do that because that bicep tendon has become frayed, irritated. It hurts bad, so they cut it off and stick it back in. You may have no pain afterwards, but the problem is now your shoulder is much less stable because that muscle cannot work with the longhead tricep muscle anymore above and below the glenoid because it’s cut.
Other muscles. You have your pec minor, your pec major over here, which help attach your shoulder blade and your sternum and all that stuff. You have your lat, which attach to your shoulder blade into your humerus. You have your levator scapula, which is a muscle from your shoulder blade up to your neck. You have your serratus posterior, superior, which attaches to your shoulder blade and to your spine. You have your trap muscle, the big diamond muscle in your neck right there attaches to your neck, shoulder blade and shoulders.
And then the two most important ones I want to talk about today, that people forget and don’t train together to work together in concert, is your serratus anterior and your rhomboids. Your serratus anterior runs from right below your chest like a fan and attaches to your shoulder blades.
And then the opposite side, your rhomboids go from middle of your shoulder blades out to your shoulder blades and they work together. They work together as antagonist to work with your shoulder blade to keep it in a good place. As I said, your serratus anterior and your rhomboids are complementary antagonist muscles. Let me say work in opposition with each other, but for the good of keeping your shoulder blades in the proper place.
I will go out on a limb and say the health of not only your shoulders and your upper body and your whole body is dictated a lot by the position of your shoulder blades. If my shoulder blades are not back in place, it doesn’t allow my head to stay back. It pushes my head forward. If my shoulder blades in place, it affects my pelvic area on the opposite side. So this side would affect that side, that that. So if they’re out or in a bad place it’s going to cause bad tension down the other side.
So keeping your shoulder blades in place using the serratus anterior and rhomboids is huge. When the shoulder blades are back, like I said, it’s good for the health of the body, it allows for, like I said, the head to be back and for your shoulder, your arm, excuse me, to move properly in a nice round motion. If I have bad shoulders and forward, there’s nothing I can do to make it move properly. It’s always going to move in a compromised position.
By moving in this compromised position, I start to get wear and tear wherever you have more weak links. A lot of times people get wear and tear through your supraspinatus or your bicep like I talked about, but it could be anywhere. People get frozen shoulder because it’s the same issue, too.
So you want to keep these shoulders back by using the serratus anterior and rhomboids. It allows the shoulder blades to stay back and also perform their actions, which is elevation and depression, scapula, axilla and spinal rotation and protraction and retraction. Those are the main actions you want your shoulder blades to take.
Now the reason why the serratus anterior and the rhomboids are so important is, again, they work together, but they’re part of that serratic joint. Again, to remind you, that serratic joint is a joint underneath the shoulder blade. That joint, like all joints, needs to be fluid and smart, right? So all joints need to have a lot of fluidity so they’re healthy and they also need to be turned on so they’re smart. But if I have these compromised positions, I get the opposite. They’re not fluid and they’re stupid.
I don’t know if it’s happened to you, but I’ve seen a lot of people sometimes if you push on these people shoulder blades, you hear this cracking and popping, right? They go, “Oh, my bones are moving.” That’s not your bones. That’s the liquid inside your fascia and your joint becoming all congealed because it’s not moving properly. That’s one of the issues.
The other issue is it’s turned off. So now I should have a joint that’s communicating to my brain, helping me to do a bunch of great fun things, but it’s not there. My shoulder’s a little dumber, but now I move around, I’ve got a dumb shoulder. So to work with these serratus anterior and the rhomboids, you need to do a couple of things.
First, you need to respect Hill’s muscle model. Hill, another scientist because this is not just the stuff I say, I get this from studying, says that for a muscle to be fully functional it needs three parts to work together as one, your muscle fibers, the fascia that surrounds the muscle and the joints. They all have to work together. So when you’re training your shoulders, you can’t just focus on muscles, right? Muscles only work as well as the joints are smart and the fascia surround it is fluid, open and also smart. So you have to work with all three factors.
To work with this serratus anterior, you have to understand that it’s like a fan, right? So it’s not just one way of doing things. It’s multiple different angles to work at the serratus anterior and also working with two different parts, either the part that attaches to your ribs, the part attaches to your scapula, not just one.
And you have your rhomboids, you got two of them, a major and minor. They’re not in the same place so when you work your rhomboids, you need work in different angles. The rhomboids also need to work in a very important position. You have an important position of your shoulder called above your glenohumeral. So again, again, to remind you, glenohumeral means glen is the opening, humeral means the humeral bone. Once I get above your glenohumeral angle and it’s different for each person, it’ll lock your scapula in place.
So as I go back and move my arm like that, because I’m above the glenohumeral, this bone, the humerus bone and the scapula become like one bone so we move together. If I’m lower than that and I move and I’m moving just the arm and you can feel the difference, so I feel just this moving through here, okay, fine, that’s great. But I want to work my rhomboids because my rhomboids attach to my scapula and you work above the glenohumeral. It is very, very important. You see a lot of strengthening exercises for the rhomboids or whatever, for those rhomboids, not whatever, for the rhomboids, and they’re not working above the glenohumeral.
So those are the two main muscles I want to talk about today and why they’re so important, but they don’t work alone. Again, I talk about holistic here so we talked about the different joints.
So you work in those areas of those different joints that I talked about, those five joints, and you work all those muscles I talked about before. But you also need to include things like your spine, right? So if my spine, if I’ve got this, like a more kyphotic posture that gets overly rounded and stuck, well, you can see why that happens. It pushes my shoulders forward, my head forward. So I can work the rhomboids, I can work the serratus anterior, but I also have to work all those different aspects.
That was a lot, I know that. But I hope you get a better idea of how to work with your shoulders now. And again, if you can find those exercises to work with properly, then you’re going to get a lot of results and then you can start to add on to all the different parts that I’ve drone on about, too.
If you want help with this, then I’m more than willing to help. I can do so by a couple of different ways. Three, actually. So you can join my private Facebook group if you’re on Facebook. All you have to do is go to the description, click on that link, answer a few questions, agree to the terms, and this will be an interactive way to join me to learn more.
I do like little mini trainings, I do little videos, I do masterclasses, and I interact with members in this forum to help with whatever they need.
I also have in description a link for a free ebook. So it’s how to get out of pain, get mobile and live the life of your dreams. There’s four steps to that. You can download that by simply clicking the link, putting your information in, and get an instant access.
Or if you want to find out more about this holistic exercise program or holistic way of treating yourself, then you can reach out and speak to me by using the description below to choose a time via my Calendly link and set up a time we can talk.
I hope this is helpful. I hope you have a good day and I’ll see you next week.
it’s not just working out, it’s building a foundation for a better life.
Find out more @
Ever wondered how your body's connective tissue might be playing a crucial role in your overall … [Read More] about Boost Immunity By Working Out Like This
The bench press, chest press, and push have a lot of different names, but it is essentially the same … [Read More] about Mastering the Push Pattern: It’s Not Just For Your Pecs
Are you frustrated with not being able to perform at your best? Age might not be the main culprit! … [Read More] about The Critical Link Between Therapy and Exercise for Peak Performance
