How to Fix Rounded Shoulders (GONE IN 4 STEPS!)

Rounded shoulders are one of the most common postural problems that not only makes us look bad when standing but it compromises our bodies over time. In this video, I’m going to show you how to fix rounded shoulders in just 4 steps by attacking the problem with the right series of corrections. In

JEFF: What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today I want to show you how to fix rounded shoulders in just four steps. As you can see, Jessie, we fixed Jessie.

We did fix Jessie. There we go. Jessie, actually, I’m making fun of him, but Jessie had terribly rounded shoulders and you can see that in the before and after photo right here. This was Jessie just months before we started to train him and I know a lot of you that watch this channel have watched him physically transform, in terms of the muscle he’s gained, but there’s been more to that. More importantly, it’s sort of been focusing on the framework first.

I don’t believe in building a house off a crappy foundation. You don’t want to do the same thing when you’re training. So at the same time we’ve been really working on his posture. I’m going to show you how, exactly, he did this so you can do the same thing. There are four parts to fixing your posture, but maybe you’re not even quite sure exactly if you have it yet.

There’s a quick way to do this, okay? Just stand up real quick and put your arms at your side. Without doing anything I want you to just look down at the position of your thumbs. I wasn’t trying to set you up at all, but I want you to look at the position of your thumbs. Jessie’s thumbs, right here, if he were to just stick them out – just extend your thumbs – his were actually in this direction.

At least they’re pointing in this direction, toward you. But a lot of you might find that your thumbs are pointing straight at each other because when they’re standing in front, like this, your arms are actually pointed here because your shoulders are too rounded. Now of course, you can look in the mirror too, and have validation of that, but the four things you’re going to need to do is, number one: you’re going to need to work on the joint. Number two: you’re going to have to work on muscles, in terms of the ones that are too weak, and you need to strengthen. Muscles that are tight, you’re going to need to stretch, and then we’re going to have work on habits, too.

So let’s get started right away with the joint itself. Okay, so we talked about ‘joint’ and you’re thinking, probably, what? The shoulder is messed up. If it’s rounded it’s got to be the shoulder. But ironically, it’s not.

The joint that you’re going to really want to focus on the most is your back. More specifically, your mid-back; the thoracic spine. What happens is, this gets really, really, adaptably tight on most of us, and when it does, and it starts to round out what does it do? It takes everything with it. Not just the head, but the shoulders come with it.

But if we can get an extension through the thoracic spine everything kind of goes back quickly. It’s a lot a faster way to fix it. Now, if you’re an athlete – which a lot of our viewers are – you can get a tight, posterior shoulder capsule. If that’s the case you can do the sleeper stretch I’m showing you right here. That will help to attack the shoulder itself that might be making the head of the humerus here kind of skirt forward, and be rounded, but in most cases that’s not necessarily going to be your biggest thing.

It’s more likely going to be this mid-back. So what we can do here – I’m trying to keep this really simple so you don’t have to have a lot of equipment – you can get down on the floor and do what we think is one of the most effective stretches you can do in mobilization for the thoracic spine. That is what Jessie’s doing here. He simply puts his arms up, over his head at about a 45 degree angle, and as he rotates back he tries to rotate, and keep himself, and his chest wide open. What we’re getting here is, we’re getting elevation of the arms overhead, but at the same time we’re getting this extension through the thoracic spine.

So that’s opening him up. It’s really easy. All he has to do is work on going to the left, and to the right side. You do this just a few times each day, or at least three, or four times a week, and you’ll start to see a huge difference. That’s one of the main things he did to start opening this are up.

If you want to start using equipment you can feel free to use a foam roller. Put it across the thoracic spine and work on trying to mobilize through that are. But again, I don’t even think it’s really that necessary. I think if you’re a little more consistent with this you’d have a lot better effect from doing that. So now, if we’re going to talk about muscles we’ve got to see the muscles, right?

I talked about Jessie actually making the transformation, but what we’re concerned about here is, we’ve got to decide what is tight, and what is weak. If you turn Jessie to the side, and you get in this position here you can see that we have a series of muscles that are going to get tight, and we have a series of muscles that are going to get weak. It’s called ‘Upper Cross Syndrome’ because of the way that they cross each other. So as we get into the dysfunction here, you get tightness here through the chest, you get tightness here through these muscles in the upper back. The levator and the traps.

Then, at the same time, because all this stuff gets stretched out we get weakness through a lot of the muscles of the scapula, we get weakness of the muscles inside the scapula, and we get weakness and tightness of the muscles inside the neck as well. So what we want to do is, we want to correct this. So let’s start with the stretching. With the stretching, the two that I’m most concerned about because he’s got all this internal rotation here of his arms, is the subscapularis, which is one of the four rotator cuff muscles, but it’s the only one that internally rotates, as opposed to externally rotates. Then the other thing we get is the pec minor.

So, the pec minor is actually a really interesting one because it comes in from right inside here, and it comes down, and it connects to the ribs. Now, what that would do – you can see, if this got tight and I were to pull this down, it’s going to pull the shoulder forward, around this way, it’s going to pull it down, and it’s going to tilt it this way. It’s going to bring it from here, to here. So all this stuff is obviously horrible if you have a problem with your rounded shoulders. So we can actually address both of those.

So let’s go to the subscapularis first. What Jessie would do if he’s going to stretch that out is, we know, again, it’s an internal rotator of the shoulder. So we’ve got to get into external rotation. So that means he’s got to take his arm, get it out, into external rotation as much as he can. So reaching back this way.

After he gets in that position he’s going to hook his arm up, against something. The edge of a doorway is fine. All you’re going to need to do all this stuff I’m going to show you is a band, and a doorway. Get into this thing here. I’m going to show you from below, here.

You’re striding out. Once it’s hooked in here you’re just going to rotate your chest that way, over there, and try to keep reaching back here. Like that. So Jessie, come on in. so he gets up into position here, external rotation.

It should look like he’s getting ready to throw a baseball as a pitcher. He strides out, he’s in here, he’s externally rotated, and now he starts to rotate all this that way. And you can feel all that right inside the armpit, right? JESSIE: Yeah. JEFF: That’s the thing.

You just want to hold that for about 30 seconds at a time. Again, do it a few times a week. It’s going to really help to loosen it up. Now, for the pec minor here. What he would do is, he would get himself in the position here, an