One of the more common cues I see during shoulder exercises is to pinch your scaps together. I’ve never completely understood how this started, but it is something we see almost daily.
In general, we tend to want to allow the scapula to move to position the arm. But is it ever a good idea to pinch your scaps together?
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#AskMikeReinold Episode 302: Pinching Your Scapula Together During Exercises
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Show Notes
- How to Cue the Scapula During Shoulder Exercises
- Assessing Dynamic Shoulder Mobility and Scapular Dyskinesis
Transcript
Luke Hopper:
So our question today comes from Omar, from Tampa, Florida, and he wants to know, “Would you advise against pinching the scapula together during exercises like a dumbbell press?” He says, “It never felt comfortable to me and always felt like I was trying to squeeze them, which was taken away from the press. Thank you.”
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. And Luke, that’s an amazing job. Roll tide. That was great. Good job. This is a good question. And I actually like how Omar… I don’t know. It’s almost like he pitched this to us really well because I really like what he added at the end where he said, he felt like it was taking away from the press. So, this might be an interesting question because I think we might have a couple of different approaches to answer this, but why don’t we start from the rehab perspective and talk about pinching the scapula during some of our shoulder exercises and talk about maybe what we think and what we do about that. And then, maybe we’ll shift gears to the performance setting and talk about that. But who wants to jump in and start from the PT perspective? That’s the word I was looking for. Dave, you want to start a little bit with your thoughts? Why don’t you jump in?
Dave Tilly:
Sure. I actually think I heard this first from Charlie Weingroff way back in the day when he was doing his first initial seminars or whatever. And there’s a difference between a queue and a static position. So someone who is really overreaching and is really not really doing any scapula movement, there’s a queue to retract your scapula, which would help assist with the exercise versus having it statically be stuck in a fixed position. So they’ll say someone’s doing a prone Y or a prone T, if that person has zero scapula movement in all, and they have a lot of shoulder translation, then you would queue that person to be like, “Hey, can we get a little bit of scap action?”
Dave Tilly:
But you have to understand that in order for your arms to go over your head, you need scapular movement. So it’s like if we really pinch the scaps down and back, there’s no upward rotation. There’s no post to your tilt. There’s no elevation to get that last degree of motion. So it’s all context-specific, which I feel like we say 90% of the time on the podcast. But if someone is really stuck forward and need a little queue to retract, that’s one thing versus if you don’t want to have someone be literally stuck and they can’t raise their arm up. Yeah.
Mike Reinold:
I liked what you said right there with the qualification of that, because you started off really well saying if you restrict scapular movement, this is what I heard from you, Dave, if you restrict scapular movement, then that’s not really what the shoulder does. I mean, the scapula needs to move. It needs to move in three planes in order to elevate your arms. So it’s really weird to lock out one motion that’s very much needed. We’re not talking about stabilizing the lumbar spine and lumbo-pelvic while you’re doing shoulder elevation. That’s a big difference to stabilize the core. The scap’s not part of this core, the scap’s part of the shoulder for these motions.
Mike Reinold:
But I like how you added though, perhaps if you’re sitting in a really weird position, I don’t even know what that means, but if you’re super anteriorly tilted or something, maybe you need to reset the starting position of it, but then don’t restrict the movement. So maybe pinch those gaps back to reset, but then relax and then do the movement. Is that what you were saying, Dave?
Dave Tilly:
Yeah. Again, I think it’s like you can always see someone who has a lot of downward rotation, like a downward depression, they’re really, really down. They might need a queue of elevation. Someone who’s really forward. I see a lot of young gymnast, for example, who are extremely protracted and extremely tilted forward from their sport, they’ll probably need a queue of retraction to get them in “neutral” or a better position.
Mike Reinold:
Right. That makes sense.
Dave Tilly:
[inaudible], that felt like after 10 years of listening to you and being your friend, that was my final presentation to you as a mentor. After 10 years, I had to give that answer well to pass.
Mike Reinold:
That was pretty good. I mean, I think you nailed it. I think that’s pretty good. I mean, we literally yell at people every day. People come in. I think this is a huge misconception on the internet that “pinch those shoulder blades.” And sometimes people, they’re doing it with a huge shrug. Their shoulders are up by their ears, and they’re just stabilizing. And you’re like, “That is not functional.” But Lisa, in the rowing world, this seems even more relevant between their postural adaptations and how they move their arms. What are your thoughts on this?
Lisa Lowe:
This is something I feel like Kevin’s been in the room recently when I’ve just been semi going off about the confusion of a lot of people when they come in with where their shoulder blades need to live on their body. And the really tricky thing, rowing-wise, is a big queue you get from a coach on the water, is to depress your shoulder, to get your lats to turn on. As you’re getting tired, you might sneak up with your shoulders into your ears, so then they’re just constantly telling you to put your shoulders down and find your lats.
Lisa Lowe:
But then you end up with these extremes where people are, like we were saying, pinching down and then they’re creating TOS symptoms or they’re creating all these other problems that are just like, “No, your shoulder blade is supposed to move with you. And no, we’re not coming overhead, overhead.” It’s not the same as hanging from a bar in gymnastics, or even throwing a baseball or any of that stuff. You’re not coming that high up. But your shoulder blade still needs to be mobile in order to get your arm in the proper position, in order for your lats to be at the proper length-tension relationship, in order for your upper traps to not be so long that all they want to do is turn on and pull your shoulder back up.
Lisa Lowe:
And so, I have all age groups of rowers that come in, whether it’s been from years on the water of a coach telling them, “Keep your shoulders down, keep your shoulders down.” Or other PTs trying to help them with shoulder pain and then queuing them into these pinching motions and confusing them into feeling like all they need to do is just hold their shoulder blade back. And then they’re doing what they’re supposed to and their shoulder’s going to work well.
Lisa Lowe:
And then, we can see how everything just gets really confused and falls apart. And legitimately, I have 60-year old rowers coming in, just being like, “And I don’t really know where this needs to live.” So they’re just creating all these issues for themselves.
Lisa Lowe:
So this is one of my, I feel have rants to Kevin very frequently recently of “why are these people telling that you need to keep your shoulder blade static?” That just doesn’t make any sense.
Mike Reinold:
I feel like Kevin’s the recipient of rants often, right?
Lisa Lowe:
Sorry, Kev.
Mike Reinold:
I mean-
Kevin Coughlin:
I like it.
Mike Reinold:
I mean, not even PT-related usually when I’m in there, but it’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, I wonder where this came from. I’m trying to think about it like if this was a hip or maybe a knee, I mean, do you stabilize one side of the joint and move the other one? Yeah, maybe. Right? So maybe it’s the hip, and you’re trying to do a hip exercise. Do you stabilize lumbo-pelvic, which is the acetabulum? And then move the femur. Yeah, I guess you do.
Mike Reinold:
So I see maybe people are like, “Let’s stabilize the glenoid and just move the humerus.” But what they then expect though, is that they have full humeral movement for their shoulder. But no, I mean, you need the glenoid to move the humerus, right? So let’s flip this a little bit and let’s talk about performance because in the weightlifting world, maybe even the power lifting, and even competitive mode, perhaps there is a reason where this is beneficial, right? And I don’t know. Diwey, Jonah, who wants to jump in and talk about, when do we say, “Let’s stabilize the scapula during an exercise?” What type of person, what type of exercise? What do you guys do? Jonah, you want to hit this one?
Jonah Mondloch:
Yeah. So what I would say is “we’re going to do upper body pressing movements with a wide variety.” So some of our movements like a landmine press or a cable press or pushups, we want the scaps moving. I think it’s important to train the scaps to move given everything you guys just talked about, they move in real life. They move when we’re playing our sports. But there’s going to be certain movements in the gym that will be optimized if we do try to keep the scaps a little bit more in a set position. It doesn’t mean that there’s going to be absolutely no movement, but like you mentioned, with power lifting, if somebody’s doing a barbell bench press, we might as well coach it at least a little bit in a way that the people who are the best bench pressers in the world do it.
Jonah Mondloch:
And if you watch most power lifters, their scaps more or less are staying retracted the whole time. There’s probably a small degree of movement that’s happening. So it’s not like I’m going to be staring directly at the scap, and if we get one inch of protraction, I’m not going to be yelling at the athlete for that. But I do see a lot of people when they first start doing a barbell bench press, they do have a way too much of overreach. In which case, we’ll be queuing them to try to stay a little more static.
Mike Reinold:
Which makes sense. So the important part in, let’s say, like a bench press and let’s say a competitive bench press, like a power lift competition, then the important component is just the movement of the humerus to push the bar up. So the more you can stabilize, the better. And to that person, just to be clear, that is quite functional because I want to use that word intentionally right there, there’s quite functional for that movement. But I think what happens is that’s a very small movement, it’s below nineties. So theoretically, that is just your humerus, right, you know what I mean? You don’t need as much. Is that what we want from normal function of the shoulder? Probably not for overhead reach and stuff, but that maybe a little bit more specific. So Diwey, anything to add to that? Or what do you think? Did Jonah nail it?
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah. I know. He nailed it on the bench for us. I’d argue that even on a competitive back spot, you probably want a little bit retract the scap to create the shelf for the barbell to sit on. In terms of power lifting, I think the main conversation is we’re trying to have as little movement elsewhere as possible. Right? We want our prime movers to be doing all the work. If we’re doing a squat, we don’t want other things moving because we already have a ton of weight on the bar on our spine. We got to do whatever’s possible to stabilize everything else, so that our legs and our back can do the work. So yeah, retract on the back squat, retract on the bench press, like Jonah said. Everything else, probably keep it moving just like it’s supposed to, in real life.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah. So go back to Omar’s question. It sounds like he was very specifically talking about dumbbell bench press, which is fine. And maybe that’s what he’s doing. I mean, I don’t think we coach all our athletes to do it that way, I mean if you’re trying to be a competitive bench presser, so if you’re in power lift competition type thing, then that might maximize that lift. But I think with our athletes, that’s not a definitive thing that we’re all doing. Some people, we want the creative freedom of where their scaps wants to move, right, and that’s important.
Mike Reinold:
So Omar, hopefully that helped. I think that was a really good question because we do see that every day, a lot of misconceptions about that. So hopefully that helped. If you have a question like that, head to MikeReinold.com, click on that podcast link and you can fill out the form to ask us another question. Anything you guys want to talk about, we appreciate it. And please head to Apple podcast, Spotify, rate, review, subscribe. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thank you.
