Head, Neck and Shoulders

The shoulders consist of your upper arm, shoulder joint, shoulder girdle head and neck. Problems in the joint are not always localized to the joint itself, but can come from several problems up or down the kinetic chain. A mobile and healthy shoulder can contribute to your quality of life and performance significantly.

Speaking purely structurally, the shoulder joint itself is supposed to be very mobile. This means that it’s mobility, as described earlier, is predicated on the head, neck, shoulder girdle, and upper arm muscle being mobile enough to accommodate that action. So if you have problems getting the shoulder joint into the positions you need it in, start moving the surrounding tissues. Most of us have problems in the head, neck and shoulders just because of how we sleep and sit. Spending all night curled up on your side with your shoulders hunched up into your ears teaches the muscle to be tight. Sitting all day with rounded posture and soggy cores teaches the shoulders to hang forward in stressful positions. If you don’t ever correct these problems then don’t be surprised when you continue to have problems with your shoulder mobility.

Kelly Starrett has a great video here to assist that (in case you missed it a few posts back):

Energetically speaking, if we trace the lines of nerve activation back up through the shoulder joint, they pass through the neck, and into the head. Conversely those same nerves run all the way down to the fingers. So we can deduce that nerve impulses for movement that are fired from the brain have to run through and activate along through the neck into the shoulder joint. Thus, your kinection to your head and neck determines your kinection to your shoulder. The same could be said of the elbow, wrist, hands and fingers. All those nerves are running from farther upstream. In order to take care of the distal body parts we must first kinect to the proximal ones.

Metaphysically speaking, if we know that nerve energy flow from intentional actions and expressions runs from proximal to distal, then every thought and emotion and mental paradigm you inhabit is expressing itself along those same nerve pathways mentioned above. Don’t believe me? Try not talking or gesturing with your hands during communication all day today. At all. Good luck with that. Thus, we can deduce that your mental paradigms are contributing to your neck shoulder and arm function. How you think and feel is creating tension in the muscle, which is then generating actual measureable structural patterns of the muscle behavior that are hard to break out of.

So if you have a problem with shoulder mobility, start thinking about how you move based on what you’re thinking and feeling. As I mentioned in the previous post, you may have structural patterns in your muscle behavior that are just leftover from years of thoughts and feelings that you no longer identify with. You can release all that stored energy running through your nerves, creating tight muscles, by relaxing. If your nerves are overcrowded with electrical signals, stop sending the signal. Reset the system from the source of the problem; your mind.

There is a great meditation video to help with that:

That is why fitness is a two-way street. We can’t keep going to the gym and moving our body while paying no attention to our mind. Our absent minded tunnel vision of the physical body while neglecting the mental and spiritual is stifling our growth. It’s perpetuating unawareness that is causing auto-pilot movement methods to set in so deep that you aren’t even aware they exist, let alone change them enough to reduce the chronic pain, mobility limitations and performance plateaus you’re experiencing. Remember homework #6? “Wake up!” Start waking up through the head, neck and shoulders.