5 Simple At-home Fitness Tips For Women

hi friends kathy madeo back with another tutorial this one all about your shoulders and downward facing dog i hope to provide you some clarity on what the heck is going on in the shoulder joint let's get started i think part of the confusion with your shoulders and downward facing dog is in part because your shoulder joint is a complex joint it's also a very mobile joint there's lots of different bones and muscles and ligaments here also part of the confusion i think comes in our cueing as teachers and not distinguishing which part of the shoulder joint we mean when we give specific cues so i in a way here to talk about which direction your shoulders go want to separate a little bit the shoulder joint here into two different ways so first i want to talk about your upper arm arm bone this is your humerus bone it sits in your glenohumeral joint or your socket here so this arm bone can move in several different directions it can go in external rotation away from your body it can go in internal rotation so rolling in it can abduct move away from your body and it can add duct move towards your body it can also flex this is forward and extend go behind you and that's not to be confused with your elbow joint or your wrist joint we're just going to talk about the shoulder joint here so we know already in downward facing dog that our upper arm bone or our arm is flexed in the shoulder socket because it's above us right but one of the things i want to point out here is it's also an external rotation most postures are the upper arm bone is an external rotation when you're weight bearing on your hands so that's kind of a general principle so we can say for sure that in downward facing dog we want your upper arm bone in external rotation and that the arm is flexed we don't need to say that because it is so so when your teacher might say something like roll your shoulders away from your ear they're not talking about your shoulder blades they're talking about your upper arm bone so you want to move the upper arm bone in external rotation in order for it to sit in the shoulder socket and be able to bear the weight on your hands so now part two the shoulder blades so your shoulder blades move in six different directions so we have upward rotation upward so the shoulder blades go out and up and then we have downward rotation they go down we also have protraction so the shoulder blades move away from the spine and retraction the shoulder blades move in towards the spine we have elevation the shoulders shrug up and depression the shoulders go down now there's no denying just like with our flexed arm bone there's no denying one of these movements and downward facing dog when we bring the arms over our head our shoulder blades go in upward rotation so we don't want to do things to kind of negate that natural movement i see a lot of students trying to depress their shoulders and downward facing dog or retract their shoulders i see a lot of students try to squeeze their shoulder blades together and downward facing dog and that's kind of going against this natural movement of upward rotation so what should the shoulders be doing the shoulder blades be doing right we already have already established that they're an upward rotation now when we're weight bearing on our hands and we have our shoulder blades especially in that upward rotation we want to stabilize the shoulder blade a little bit and the serratus anterior which is this side muscle here is one of the muscles that we can turn on to stabilize the shoulder blade and so in downward facing dog rather than bringing your shoulders down and depressing them and going against that upward rotation you actually want to push the floor away a little bit so that's a slight elevation that's going to help stabilize those shoulder blades there on your back so let's just look at this we'll kind of see this in my body here i'm going to take downward facing dog i'll show some don'ts first if our upper arm bone is an internal rotation it would look like this you notice my elbows kind of bend and that's also starting to bring my shoulder blades into retraction a little bit so instead remember i want to externally rotate my upper arm bones and then from there rather than trying to squeeze the shoulder blades in towards the spine we don't want that right we want to externally rotate those upper arm bones and then push the floor away those are our shoulders and downward facing dog i hope separating these two areas of the shoulder joint was useful to you and that you're able to distinguish them and your own downward facing dog let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this video