This week I will continue down the road of posture and give you my favorite upper back strengthening exercise to help with posture and losing the slouch of your upper back and shoulders.
Strengthening the muscles that this exercise targets is important for upper back pain because they are generally muscles that tend to be weakened in people and cause poor posture. So since poor posture can be a cause of upper back pain in the first place, it is important to fix the underlying cause, or at least one of them. Remember though doing this exercise will help you best when combined with adjustments. If the joints are just not moving you are essentially running into a brick wall. The adjustment helps free up the mobility and then we need to retrain the muscles. Both parts are important, or we will just end up doing the same thing over and over again and not correcting the posture.
Ok so last week we talked about posture and why good posture is important. If you missed it please see the blog post here: https://drkarenhudes.ca/index.php/2022/09/07/upper-back-pain-and-posture/
Strengthening exercise for upper back pain
My favourite exercise for upper back strengthening is wall angels. You need a bit of empty wall space for this one. Stand with the back of your heel and your butt touching the wall. Put your arms up over your head in a ‘cactus’ position and make sure your upper arms, forearms, wrists and hands are touching the wall and stay flat against it the whole time. This sounds simple but is the hardest part. Now slowly draw your elbows down skimming the wall until they get as close to your waist as you can. Repeat this 5-10 times (start with 5).
This sounds easy but is really hard and most people let their hands and/or wrists come up off the wall at some point. The goal is to keep them flat. Try squeezing the muscles between your shoulder blades when you do this.
To see the YouTube video that I made for this exercise please click here
Please share this newsletter with anyone you think it may be helpful for! Here is the link to the blog post to make it easy to access: https://drkarenhudes.ca/index.php/2022/09/12/upper-back-strengthening/