Posted by Click aquí para leer este post en español
Hey Life warriors!
The shoulders are a key joint for us, since any movement we want to do with our arms starts from them; Healthy and strong shoulders are essential, not only to be able to correctly train our entire upper body, but also for almost any activity in our daily lives; Continuous bad posture due to office work and all the time we spend hooked on mobile devices weakens and causes imbalances that often result in injuries. In this article we are going to learn more about its anatomy, movements and what could be a good routine for shoulder training.
The shoulder is the joint with the greatest range of motion in the entire body, and, precisely for that reason, it is also the most unstable:
As for the joint itself, the shoulder is made up of the upper part of the humerus, which inserts into a small cavity in the scapula, called the glenoid cavity. Both bones are joined by different ligaments (capsule, coracohumeral ligament and glenohumeral ligaments).
By National Institute Of Arthritis And Musculoskeletal And Skin Diseases (NIAMS); SVG version by Angelito7 – Shoulderjoint.PNG, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29907860
From a muscular point of view, there are several muscles involved in shoulder movements; Some of these muscles are visible, such as the deltoids or biceps, but others are not, and these are the ones we want to talk to you about: supraspinatus, subscapularis, teres minor and infraspinatus, known as the rotator cuff.
As their name suggests, these muscles (along with the biceps) form a cuff around the joint, contributing to its stability. In this video you can see a brief explanation about each of them:
Once we understand their anatomy, how should we train the shoulders?
Traditionally we have seen shoulder training only from the perspective of the muscles that we can see, that is, the three portions of the deltoid (anterior, lateral and posterior). To this we should add the two rotations, external and internal. Normally our activities are more oriented towards internal rotation: typing on a keyboard or mobile phone, driving or handling anything with our hands usually keep our shoulders in internal rotation. For this reason, we usually have a good level of strength in the anterior part, much less in the lateral part and much less in the posterior part.
To compensate for these imbalances, avoid injuries and get a good shoulder workout, we propose the following routine for shoulder training; you just need a rubber band😉
- Warm Up
Choose 4 exercises from the 9 that you will see in this video. We will do two rounds of 20 seconds of each of them, with 10 seconds of rest between exercises (a Tabata protocol as you may have guessed 😉)
- Pike Push Up 3×15
- Lateral raises 3×20
- Rear Flies 3×20
Try this routine and tell us how it goes!😉