Please go to Session 29/30 in your Course Packet and follow along. Pause the video to review the question and your answer as we progress through each question.

Now watch the video and read the article on the shoulder girdle below. Often, we try to address the shoulder girdle as a singular unit, but to find true change we have to see it as a whole with the rest of the body.

The ideas presented here will show you a way to understand the system more deeply, and create new ways to problem solve.

SHOULDER BLADES: The Middle Child of the Body

by Casey Marie Herdt

I want to expand on the previous article a bit and shed some light on some of the sneakier family dynamics of the upper core system.

Each of our body parts has a particular role to play in the balancing act that is living posture. Just like being at the dinner table, surrounded by the people who both love you and drive you crazy, the body can succumb to the same type of “meltdowns” that you might expect around Thanksgiving. But knowing who the key players are, and how they connect and communicate, can make movement easier and less cumbersome—and certainly less painful.

So when a client comes in with their shoulder blades glued to their ears, you can be sure of a few things:

1. They are a lousy breather. The muscles of the shoulder girdle have taken on the burden of being a main muscle of respiration. Thus the suppleness and mobility of the ribcage—which is usually milked and stimulated by the breath—is sadly gone.
2. One or both hips are very tight, as well. Here we could get into a chicken and egg conversation, but this is the gist of it: Your body, in its amazing ability to adapt to changing environments and situations, will always strive for balance in the way it knows how. The hip joints are large, and are surrounded by very sizable muscles to boot. So when this joint becomes compromised by tightness, and acquires the lack of range of motion that comes with it, your body will never let you walk around with that asymmetry. Instead, it taps into its rooted instincts and will give that tightness a matching immobility. Misery loves company.
3. Their spine has not moved fully and evenly in a very long time. With the vertebral column bookended by this tightness, it is not hard to imagine why so many people have little to no range or strength in the thorax. That enabling and codependency of the moving limbs wreaks havoc on the rest of the family of core systems.

So the next time you have a client with some mobility issues in their scapula, remember that the malfunction is not only relegated to that one area, but also shared with the whole of the body system. And to get true change and freedom in the shoulder blades, you must address the obnoxious older brother or the annoying little sisters in the body. Only through healing those systems at the same time can change last in the body.

Make sure to initial and date that you have completed Session 30 in your Master Log.