Rounded Shoulders

[maresf16]

I just wanted to follow up here with everyone on my shoulder injury - not for my sake, but for yours.

I've been having posterior pain in my left shoulder whenever I do presses or chins, so I haven't been able to train chest or lats for over two months now. I had an MRI done and they read it and said nothing was wrong with anything inside. Then they suggested I go in for a session of PT. So I did. The lady I worked with seemed like she knew her stuff and she told me I had a combination of tight pecs and shoulders that were too rounded forward. When I say rounded, I don't mean shape-wise I mean position wise. My shoulders are both too far forward, which gives me kind of a slumped over look when I stand up.

The recommended therapy consists of a variety of weighted exercises to strengthen the rotator cuff muscles and the lower traps. As incidence would have it, I've never actually been able to hit the lower traps really well, so it makes sense that those muscles would be relatively weak. In fact, it turned out any muscles that have to do with retracting the scapula are really weak on me - particularly on the left side. My favorite day in the gym is back, so I didn't miss it out of bad form or refusal to work one area. It was simply ignorance and a cookie-cutter program, I think.

So the moral of the story is: stretch your pec muscles regularly to let your shoulders roll back to their normal anatomical position. Also, make sure your rotator cuff is strong, and if you can, hit your lower traps pretty hard to balance out the strength from your pecs. Doing all of this will ensure that you never run into shoulder problems from having a strength imbalance. It's a pretty ****ty condition that takes forever to diagnose and weeks of therapy to fix, so it will slow you down in any contest preparation.

That's my news iron bros. Now get in there and do what I didn't do right.

[SouljaJoe010]

repped