Hi guys,  Kris from Custom Fitness here, your Amarillo personal trainer. Today we’re going to be talking about a pain coming from your arm. If you have any questions about today’s blog, then please give us a call at (806)-322-3188

So when it comes to arm pain, a lot of times you feel a grabbing sensation. You feel like it’s hard to extend the arm up, hard to open the arm to the side, or pull something back. Where is that pain coming from and how can we fix it?

So more often than not, there’s a grabbing pain that stops your extending arm, is typically coming from your posture. Go figure, right? So our posture, how could that affect our arm?

Well, first off, we have to understand that the body works as a chain reaction so every part is connected to another part and should you forget that, something like this will quickly remind you.

So instead of having your shoulders back all the time and good posture here, we typically are looking at devices and computers and things in front of our face and we’re standing more and more rounded. Maybe we’re playing video games. Maybe we’re just hanging out on the couch relaxing.

The thing is, not only is posture affecting your energy levels, your sleep ability, and your mental focus, but not it’s also causing physical pain to your body. That’s just irritating, right? So how do we fix it?

Well, we start by fixing our posture. So let’s start first with what the actual issue it. It’s this rounded shoulder you probably have. As this shoulder starts to round forward, you’ll see that the head of the humerus right here starts to go forward. That pushes into a lot of musculature that shouldn’t be stretching that direction.

So it’s pushing forward, it’s actually causing a shortening up here through the pectoral muscle and in through the tendons and ligaments in that direction, and it’s causing an overstretching here in the upper back.

Now, I try not to get too technical because I wanna make sure everybody understands what I’m talking about. So really it’s just this rounded shoulder position. You can see that it’s not a natural position, right?

However, it’s becoming more and more natural as we walk around and people watch.

So as we stand, where it should be, is it should pick itself up and over here, so if we’re rounded and all we do is pull back, you didn’t fix the roundness issue here. What we’ve gotta do is actually roll that shoulder back and we’ve got to set the shoulder blade into a different position.

So with the shoulder rounded, the shoulder blade then fans open, if you will. It pushes back. So what we’ve gotta do is we’ve gotta reset that shoulder blade into the correct position to support and stabilize through that shoulder girdle.

So how do we fix this? What do we do? Well, first off, we work on the posture. So anytime that we can think about it, breakfast, lunch, dinner. We start to focus on our my shoulders rolled back, am I opening, do I feel almost a stretching sensation in the chest? Great.

So then there’s some stretches that we can do. We can do a doorway stretch where we put our arm inside the doorway. If you’ve been watching this for a while you probably saw me do that one a few weeks ago, where we stretch and open and we can do that with both arms, opening into a doorway. Or we could just do it with one side and stretch and feel that stretch through the chest.

So we’ve stretched the chest where it got short. What do we do for the back to make it set that stretch blade back in the right position?

Well, we start doing some easy exercises. You can do this with a dumbbell, with a band, with a water bottle, whatever you’ve got at home, and you can start out with a very flat back or holding on to a bench and rowing here.

What we wanna think about though when we’re rowing is we’re not just pulling that weight up. We’re not just going through the motion because that could still lead to that position here, right?

What we wanna do is we wanna open that shoulder, pinch between the shoulder blades and squeeze up, so it’s all about the squeezing you get in shoulder blade as you pull, and you can do that, again, near the same angle here, being a flat back, or slightly higher at about a 45 degree angle pulling up.

You can grab a band or a stretchy sock or a stretchy pillow case and you can do pull aparts here, and as you do a pull apart, you’re just pulling back thumbs back towards the wall behind you, and you’re opening, you’re pressing the chest forward, and again, you’re working on squeezing the shoulder blades.

Pretty much any back exercises. Anything that’s gonna turn on those upper back muscles is going to help reset this posture, but I will tell you that posture is another type of beast altogether because exercise alone won’t do it.

You have to become familiar with being intentionally focused on it, meaning that we have to build a new habit to think about it more often. Okay.

I know that we don’t want anything else to think about, but honestly, we’ve gotta think about us. We’ve gotta take care of our bodies because it’s the only body we get. So if you start to bring a little more intention into your thought and your focus on posture, then through the day, those three times that you started out with at breakfast, lunch, and dinner where you think oh, stand up straight, hold that posture for 30 seconds, relax, do it again.

Then eventually that starts to spread into between meal times, and then eventually it starts to spread throughout the day.

So it’s just a matter of getting that intentional focus and starting to be really aware of how we’re standing and what we’re doing, and what I wanna tell you is that if you’ve been having that grabbing pain, a lot of times if you just start to open the chest and do those stretches and do those exercise, you’re gonna start to feel that pain diminish and it’s gonna be quite radical on how that works.

So, if you are wanting the accountability and help with creating an action plan to see results, or are wanting to someone to help create a workout plan to push you to your greatest potential, then that’s what we’re here for. We work with our clients not just on fitness, but also nutrition. What we do is we will ensure that you are supported throughout every aspect of your health and wellness journey, and that includes making those eating changes. We have an entire team of dedicated professionals to help you with your health and fitness goals. To get your consultation set up, give us a call at 806-322-3188 or email us at info@customfitness.biz At Custom Fitness, we are YOUR personal trainers in Amarillo, Texas. Have a great day.