How to Fix Scapular Winging (STEP BY STEP!)

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JEFF: Off of the pelvis. So we know – oh my God. Raymond’s gone. Okay. So he’s out.

So we know that the pelvis can change position… What’s up, guys?! Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Oh, he’s back.

You knew he’d be back. You can’t keep a good man down, especially if he’s already dead. See, Raymond’s back and today he’s going to help us because today we’re going to talk all about scapular winging. It’s a common problem and it’s actually a complex problem to fix, but it could be a little easier if you take the right step by step approach. We have to do that.

What is scapular winging, for those of you aren’t really aware of what it is? It’s the position of the shoulder blade in relation to your rib cage, especially as you move your arm. So it’s when the shoulder blade wings, or pushes back this way. If you look at it from the side it’s doing this. The insider border is pushing away from your ribcage.

So it’s creates this gap that actually looks like a pair of angel wings if someone were to look at you from the back. Well, there’s a big problem with this. If you have any movement dysfunction at all in your shoulder blades you can assure yourself that you have a movement dysfunction in your arm and your shoulder as you try to raise it up over your head because you can’t raise your arm over your head without having movement of your shoulder blade. I could do that with Jessie right now. If he were to raise his arm up, over his head, all the way up he gets to the top only because he’s got two thirds of the movement working well here, and one third of the movement working well at his shoulder blades.

But if I were to come in here and hold his shoulder blade down like this he actually can’t raise it beyond that point because I’ve stopped the motion. So we can see right away, if you’re not moving properly here you’ve got big problems. It’s a big, common problem to have shoulder issues when you’re lifting. So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to fix this. So Raymond, thank you.

You’re back. I’m so happy. If you come here – Jessie, go ahead and take off your shirt. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to assess your posture and what you look like here as you raise your arms up, over your head toward the front of you. So have somebody take an iPhone and film what you look like.

You’re going to take your arms in front of your body. You see Jessie’s gains here. Go ahead and raise all the way up. All the way up. Okay, then come back down.

Don’t just drop them. Come down a little bit better than that. So raise them all the way up. Raise them all the way up. Okay, now come on down.

Yeah, right there. Stop. Right here you see where this pops off his ribcage. You can see I can fit my fingers, literally, underneath his shoulder blade here. That is a wing.

The medial side here is winging off his ribcage that way. That’s the first thing you want to look for to see if you get that on the way down. On the way up there’s a couple other things you want to look for. First of all, look at the position of his shoulders. This one is clearly higher than his right shoulder.

He’s got this up. That’s because of the tightness in a muscle that we’re going to address here. The second thing was, as he went up he had a little bit of a head bid there that actually reinforced the fact that I know that this levator scapulae is tight. We’re going to want to address that. Then the other thing is, does he get a bunching up in here of the rhomboids as he’s going this whole motion?

You would see that the shoulder blades kind of come together and make a crack down the middle. You didn’t see as much of that there, but if you do then I’m going to show you what to do. So the first thing is, you have to address these via stretches. Jessie, you’re going to come right here. You want to address this via stretches because if these muscles are tight – we all know that have a winged scapula is going to be caused by a weakness in the serratus anterior muscle.

But if that weakness is caused by the fact that the muscles on the opposite side of the serratus are tight, then all the strengthening in the world is not going to ultimately fix the problem. You have to stretch the muscles that are causing the problem on the other side of the serratus. So, I mentioned the levator scapula, I mentioned the rhomboids. You could do the two stretches like this. The rhomboid stretch, you’re going to put your butt into the wall, Jess, and you’re going to take your hands out in front of your body here, and you’re going to reach out, keep your butt up, anterior tilted pelvis there, reach, reach, reach, reach, until you feel the shoulder blade stretching out.

Okay, he’s reaching as far as he can to stretch this out. Get that – just like that. There you go. Now go ahead. One more time.

Reach out. Hold, reach. There you go. Like that. So go ahead and turn so they can just see what you’re doing.

All the way like this. You’re getting this stretched right here, in these muscles that pull the shoulder blades here together. The next thing is even better. It’s the levator, the thing that’s causing him to have all that head nod and things going on. That raising of the higher left shoulder.

You’re going to stretch it out, you’re going to look down to the opposite pocket of the side that’s tight. So if you have a high left shoulder you’re going to look down toward the right pocket. You put yourself back, up against the wall, shoulders back and down, you’re looking toward that pocket, use your hand to just reinforce and hold it in that position, an then you’re going to raise this arm up because the levator is a muscle that wants to downwardly rotate the scapula. By going like this we’re upwardly rotating the scapula. So we’re getting a good stretch on that muscle that’s right here.

Can you feel it? JESSIE: Yeah. JEFF: Yeah. So we want to make sure that we’re stretching this. How many times a day?

How often? A couple times a day for a good portion of time. 30 seconds to 60 seconds. Just do it a couple times, but it’s more routine in terms of doing it regularly throughout the week. It didn’t take you one night to get here.

It’s not going to take you one night to fix it. If you don’t have any of those problems the next thing you want to do is assess your posture and standing. Two things: you’re looking at the posture in the front, and the posture from the side, and you have to look at the posture from the other side. You can see that on this side here, even though we’ve been working a lot with Jessie to try to help fix this, this side is a little bit rounded. So it’s indicating to me that he’s got internal rotation here.

Or some of the internal rotators are too tight that are causing that. Maybe even a weakness in the external rotators, but subscapularis, number one. Lats, number two. Pec minor, number three. All three stretches I’ve actually done videos on how to stretch those out.

So to avoid those things becoming 30 minutes long I’ll link those in the description below on how to stretch all of those. But you want to stretch those because if those muscles are tight and you’re creating this sort of shoulder posture you can mechanically cause a weakness in the serratus by impacting the thoracic nerve. The long thoracic nerve. It’s a nerve that literally feed the serratus anterior. So if that nerve is all screwed up you’re going to get a weakness in the muscle that it connects to.

So you could strengthen the serratus all day long, again, like we said before, and do nothing to fix the problem because we haven’t fixed the issue that’s causing the weakness in the first place. So if you test out and you see that you have this roundedness, or this depression on one side in standing then you have to stretch and follow the stretches I’v