Take a look at your posture. Notice anything? Like your shoulders rounding forward even when you are allegedly standing up straight?

Welcome to CrossFit posture! All those pull-ups and pushups and thrusters overwork your pecs causing them to pull forward on your shoulders. In turn, this pulls on the complex of muscles that comprise your rotator cuff, leading to improper tracking as you raise your arms overhead. Further, the muscles that run down your spine, the traps, never get worked or strengthened in a CrossFit WOD and they help to stabilize the rotator cuff so it can rotate properly.

So, what’s the big deal?

For me, this imbalance significantly decreased my shoulder mobility (think of a complete inability to reach far enough across my body to scratch my other shoulder!) and caused my bicep to get pinched where it inserts in the shoulder causing a pulling/pinching pain in my right bicep. Big deal, you say? So you can’t scratch that itch, who cares? You should care because this issue also prevented me from increasing the weight of my overhead lifts and caused significant pain trying to bring the weight down from overhead.

What can you do to prevent the joyful trips to physical therapy and the fun that is ASTYM (ASTYM therapy regenerates healthy soft tissues and eliminates or reduces unwanted scar tissue that may be causing pain or movement restrictions through something that feels like someone trying to dig through your body and out the other side with a hard plastic spatula!) Not to mention the cost (that big deductible seemed like such a good idea at the time!)

READ THIS ARTICLE! DO THESE EXERCISES!

Seriously, these are EXACTLY the exercises and stretches my physical therapist has me doing, but for a whole lot less money (and damn you Vince for not posting this weeks ago!!!!) Not that I would have followed my own sage advice 🙁

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