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Are you finding that your performance out on the field or how much weight you’re lifting in the gym has been lacking of late? Well, I’m going to show you today that it might not have anything to do with your strength and everything to do with your mobility. What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavalere, athletex. com.

Like I said, whether you are trying to enhance your athletic performance or whether you’re trying to just lift simply more weight in the gym, a lot of times it’s not your strength that’s the limiting factor. We’ve actually discussed this a bit in some of our past videos. I’m talking about the main limiting factor could be your mobility. And there’s one particular area that I feel is more impaired in most people than mo than any other. And that is your thoracic spine mobility.

Okay, what we’re talking about is this area pretty much here from the top of your shoulder blades down to here above where your lumbar spine starts. Now, how do we test to see how impaired we are? Well, there’s a couple ways actually we could use the bat right now. If we take a bat or a golf club or something, you put it over your shoulders like this. Now, the normal posture for most of us is slightly rounded.

Okay? Like this. This would be sort of our comfortable posture. I’m guilty of it myself. I tend to work at a computer a lot.

I’m out here like this. So, we tend to get round shoulder. So, with that in mind, we take our normal posture. Again, butt tucked under a little bit most likely. And we try to turn and rotate.

Now, when we rotate, we peek down the barrel of the bat here and see about how far this bat has gone up against the wall there. Again, where does it line up? The next thing we do then is try to correct that. We take away this flexion through our thoracic spine. We get up nice and tall, shoulders back, okay, butt out, and then we rotate and turn.

And we see that we’ve gained about 20 or 30°. That’s test number one. Most likely when you do that, you’re going to see a big difference by just correcting that posture in the midback. Second thing you can do, again, take that posture, raise your arm up as high as you can. At this point, for me, that’s as high as I can go.

Why? Because up here in the shoulder girdle, I’ve actually run out of room. I’m actually hitting the humorris up against the acchromium. I’ve lost space. I can’t get any higher.

We have bone on bone preventing that. If I get some extension through here, I’m able to go much higher and much further back. So, what should that be telling you? You need extension through your thoracic spine. Almost everybody needs extension.

So, there’s a few ways that I think you can do it quickly and easily. And we can use just a few things around the house. You don’t have to have a foam roller. You can do this over a barbell with a pillow over the top. You could do this over I’ve seen people do it over kegs in case this isn’t the only time for that with the summer.

But you basically want to get over the top of a foam roller. Cross your arms around your your body so that you can take up the slack of the muscles. Get the shoulder blades out of the way. And you can work on the spinal segments in the thoracic area around your body like this. Drop your hips down.

Okay, dropping it down. Again, that’s going to get a little bit more extension. And then try to bend over the foam roller. Now, guys, don’t try to just sit here and roll like that. I see guys roll like this all the time.

It’s not doing a damn thing because you’re not working on extension through a specific segment, okay? Okay. In that in that thoracic area. So again, wrap around, drop down, and work on a couple areas at a time. Wherever you feel the restriction, you should do that.

You can then turn to the side at a specific area and work on rolling to get more rotational forces. Okay. So now we do that. The next thing we try to do here is one that doesn’t require anything. Okay.

This is one that I love because it incorporates rotation at the same time. So, we step through. It’s kind of like our Brock shuffle exercise that we use in Athlete X. I’m in here in a onepoint stance or three-point stance. I step through and then I rotate here and then rise up onto this arm.

Okay. A lot of extension through my thoracic spine, but I reach out towards the camera. Why? because I’ve got extension and rotation at the same time. If I went like this, I’m not really rotating the thoracic spine.

I’m just extending. So, I want to extend and rotate like that. Of course, work through the other side here. Extend and rotate. A great way to mobilize.

And again, it doesn’t matter if you have athletic goals because guys, if you’re a pitcher, you need to be able to first of all get your arm up. If you’re a quarterback, you got to be able to get that arm up and you have to be able to rotate. If you’re a lifter and you’re trying to do overhead lifting, but you’re in that position there, you can’t ever fully go through a range of motion. So, you’re going to need full extension. Here’s the final point I’m going to leave you with.

The thoracic spine has a limited amount total degrees of motion. It can occur either front and back, side to side or through rotation. Every degree that you take up because of bad posture in this direction is one degree you lose either in your ability to rotate and or have side to side uh flexion. So remember that when you decide how important it is to maintain every degree of extension that you’re going to have. Again, gravity is going to want to push you down over time.

You want to hold on to these with your with dear life because anything you do, lifting or performance, is going to depend upon your ability to hold on to thoracic extension. Guys, if you haven’t already, head over to athletex. com and grab the 90-day training program. I say we put the science back in strength. These are the kind of things I think that a lot of programs overlook, but as I just showed you, I hope you can see, it’s extremely important to focus on some of these things that maybe don’t seem so important at the outset.

I trust me, they are extremely important and allow you to perform as I showed you in whatever realm you want to. We want to make sure that we work them into all of our workouts and make sure that you’re not missing anything. Because, as I say, if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an athlete. You got to hang on to everything you’ve got to keep you at your best. I’ll see you guys back here in seven days.

In the meantime, make sure you leave a comment below. Tell me if you’ve experienced anything yourself or if you like this video and it helped. I’ll see you guys back here next week.

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