How to Stretch Your Pecs (AND HOW NOT TO!)

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Pec Major. Pec Minor. Both serious problems if you let these things get tight. I’m going to show you today exactly how to stretch each one the best way. What’s up, guys?

Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. COM. Today we’re going to talk about the Pec Minor, the Pec Major, neither of which are unimportant especially if you want to maintain healthy shoulders in the gym. You see, these two muscles are going to wreak havoc on your upper body, in your shoulders particularly, if you don’t stretch them enough, or more importantly, you don’t know how to stretch them. So, I’m going to break out all the weapons to make sure that you do by the end of this video.

We’re taking out Raymond. I’m going to draw all over my damn body, and I’m going to show you the stretches and exactly how you have to do them to get the most out of this. Ok, so let’s take out Raymond here and look at the function of the Pec Major, right. We know that there are 2 portions of the Pec Major. There’s the sternal portion which is right here off of the sternum.

They come out here and they fan out to a place up here on our upper arm bone, the humerus, right about mid sternum. So, right here is where they’re inserting, ok. And then we have a clavicular portion that comes down and attaches to the same thing. So you can see that if these muscles were to pull, they’re going to pull the arm across the chest. So now, like I said, I’ll write all over my damn body.

Don’t think I won’t guys. I hope these things do come out, though. If we take our muscles here, and we look at them, they’re fanning out. They’re attaching to that point that I told you about. And from the clavicle, they’re coming down.

They’re attaching to the point I told you about. So when I contract, you can see the muscles underlying this. That’s what they’re doing. They’re bringing this across the body. Well, now we’ve got to go across.

Remember the functions of these muscles. Now, you can see that if this were to get tight, in addition to being able to pull this across, it will also rotate this arm bone in, right. If it’s attached to here and it gets tights, shortens, it’s going to pull this in that way. So, that’s why when we get tight, we have internally rotated shoulders like this. Internal rotation of our shoulders brings the whole shoulder forward.

Now, we move on to the Pec Minor. The Pec Minor is actually much more important because we never address this muscle and this has I think far more deep-reaching implications to our shoulder when we don’t because if you look at where the Pec Minor goes, it goes from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th rib right here to the coracoid process right here. Now, the most important part of that is the attachment because the coracoid process, if I spin this guy around, you can see, it’s part of the shoulder blade. It’s literally part of your shoulder blade. It’s just a point on the shoulder blade.

So, what happens when this muscle’s tight? And they go from here to here, and they’re tight, they’re going to pull down. So now we get an anterior tilt of the scapula. So it’s going to go this way, down and in. We’re going to get a downward rotation of the shoulder blade which is down this way, ok, down that way.

And then we’re going to get a protraction, so the shoulder blade’s going to come around our body this way, and we won’t be able to retract it. So again, look here. Now I’ve got my Pec Minor. So, I’ve got it coming down from inside here, coracoid process down here. When it pulls in, it’s pulling my shoulder in protraction forward.

It’s pulling and tilting it down this way. So now we get this real tilt forward of the shoulder. It’s not just an internal rotation that pec is giving us, the Pec Major, but it’s actually giving us a pulling on our entire shoulder blade. Now go try to raise your arm up and guess how much you lack in your ability to actually do that. A lot because you can’t.

If your Pec Major is tight, you’re going to fuck up your entire shoulder. And I’m sorry to say it so bluntly guys, but this is the truth. Your shoulder’s going to take a beating if you don’t stretch this muscle out. So what I wanted to do is now show you how to stretch these knowing what these functions do because all you have to do when you stretch something is reverse the motion that the muscle’s responsible for. Let me take you and show you how to do exactly that.

So, you want to upwardly rotate your scapula that way, ok, here’s the outside. Go up. You don’t want to go down, so go up. You want to retract your scapula. You don’t want it to protract.

And you want to make sure that you’re posteriorly tilting your scapula and not anteriorly tilting it. So we can do that. The way we do that is, we put our shoulder up here against something sturdy. So inside of a wall would be perfect, inside of a door jam, or a Squat Rack, Even as I’m doing here with a Smith Machine. It doesn’t matter what you do it on.

But you stabilize the front of your glenohumeral joint here, pushing it backwards. So, I’m in a nice position here, ok, so it’s nice and stable up against. Then, again, I’m on a wall here ideally, if I’m on a wall, if not I make contact with the top of the rack. Now, I want to retract my scapula together behind me. So, if I do that, you can see just here.

All I’m doing is pinching my shoulder blades back together. We’ve just taken away the protraction if I do that. Now, if I allow this to slide up, then I get the upper rotation of the scapula too which is what we’re looking for. Look what happens to the lines on my chest when I do this. Here, I’m back.

Here, I’m pinching. Here, I go into upper rotation. Look at the distance now of the lines. They’re extremely far apart now because I’m stretching the Pec Minor, and. I can feel a nice good stretch right in there.

And again, you hold it and you do your thing 30-45 seconds. Ok. Now we’re going to go into the Pec Major and the thing here is that it’s very similar how we want to stretch it but there’s a few things that you have to make sure you take note of because if you do this the wrong way, you could actually wind up hurting yourself even more. If you look at the Pec, remember, all we have to do to stretch the muscle is know where it starts and where it ends, and we know it starts here and it ends here. And it starts here, and it ends here.

So, if we can bring those 2 points further apart then we can get an effective stretch on the pec. So, for the Pec Major, you want to position yourself again here in this doorway or whatever you’re going to be able to stabilize the front of your shoulder on because we don’t want to do this and this too much. A lot of guys will find that when they do this, all they do is shoot the head of the humerus to the front of the shoulder here and really start stretching out the interior shoulder capsule. That’s not a good idea, especially if you’re a throwing athlete or somebody that’s already had issues in your shoulder joint. So, what you can do is, make sure that that doesn’t pop forward this way by staying back set in the shoulder joint.

So, we can do that by pushing up against here in the shoulder, you know, up against the door frame or Squat Rack, whatever you’re gonna do. Then you raise your arm up to 90 degrees. So now I lean forward into that stretch, so I lean through the doorway. This is keeping this set nice and back in the shoulder joint. And I lean forward and you can see the stretch.

If you want to intensify that, all you have to do is look away and down. So, by peeking away and down, I further stretch out the chest from here to here. And it doesn’t make any difference in the world whether I extend my elbow out here or I don’t. All you’re going to do if you do that is probably cause more likelihood that you’re going to shoot that head of the humerus forward into the shoulder capsule and cause a problem. So, what you want to