03/11/2023
From Chuck Duff -
Coaching The Body®
MUSCLE MATTERS #6
Hi Nita,
Understanding Shoulder Posture - Part 1
I did some work many years ago on a client and friend in her 40s who had grown up in Europe. She was experiencing pain in her shoulders and neck, and in my first evaluation, it was clear that her shoulders were locked in a rounded forward, narrowed position.
As we talked during the session, I could tell that she had a lot of shame attached to her posture, which had been an issue since she was young. It was apparently not unusual in her home country for parents to send their children to a "posture camp".
Poor posture was considered in her culture of origin to be in some way a failure of character and moral fiber, and she consequently had a lot of trauma connected to that camp experience. She had carried her shame with her to the present day.
I worked on both of her shoulders, and was able to reset them to a relatively normal position. Her shoulders looked wider and her shoulder blades moved down and back.
She looked in the mirror after the session, and as soon as she saw her reflection, she began crying. She had become convinced by her early experiences that her rounded shoulders were due to some fault in her character, and she told me that she had never before seen the woman who looked back at her in the mirror.
The Hidden Perpetuators of Rounded Shoulder Posture
While my friend's childhood experience was an extreme and unfortunate case, there is a particularly strong connection between shoulder posture and psychoemotional state in all of us.
When we're stressed, cold, anxious or afraid, people have an instinctive tendency to hunch the shoulders. This is understandable in survival terms. In boxing, elevating the shoulders and bringing them forward, with the head ducked, is a way to protect the vulnerable neck.
There is an instinctual connection between feelings of stress and self-protection and rounding the shoulders forward and up, which in my experience makes the muscles of the upper torso particularly vulnerable.
if you check in with your posture during a period of particular stress or anxiety (not hard to imagine in these times), you may find yourself having to consciously drop your shoulders and let your shoulder blades move back and down.
Combine that with our dependency on notebook computers and mobile devices, and you have the basis for what is clearly an epidemic of shoulder and neck pain.
Maintaining Balance Between Muscles and Their Antagonists
When I use the term "poor" posture, it isn't a value judgement. It's just an observation that holding muscles at an abnormal resting length is likely to produce trigger points and pain.
The central nervous system abhors imbalance within a functionally connected group of muscles. If we hold the shoulders up and forward for a long period of time, a phenomenon called adaptive shortening is likely to occur.
The muscles responsible for the forward and up movement of the shoulder blades will tend to be held in a shortened state for long periods, and at some point the body will induce taut fibers and trigger points in those muscles to keep them from being lax and loose, and to lessen the need for active engagement to keep them short.
Dr. Leon Chaitow pointed out in an important article that trigger points can serve as a stabilizing factor, so the body may recruit them in an adaptive way to stabilize unstable joints - for example, in hypermobility.
Muscle fibers in contracture from trigger points can maintain their shortened state without energy input in the form of ATP, the body's fuel for muscular work. The contractured fibers will just stay that way until the local congestion around the trigger point clears and capillaries can deliver nutrients to those areas again.
Thus, trigger points are an excellent, energy-free way for the body to adaptively shorten a muscle and to maintain the shortened state in which it has been held for some time.
