Here's an ATHLEAN XPRESS video for you that you're going to be able to start utilizing

right away.

How to start stretching out your middle back, your upper-middle back. We all hear about

the low back.

One of the most ignored areas that's in need of stretching is our upper-middle back. We

feel a lot of our stress up in this area.

Especially if you're doing a lot of Deadlifts and a lot of back training, you're going to

get tight in between your paraspinal muscles in between your scapula.

So, we have to have a way to target that. Unfortunately, a lot of the ways that we do

that, we have 3 different ways that we do that.

One of them, we'll just hang from a bar, ok. The problem with that is that we're really

just working out our lats at that point

because we're only working on the upward and downward rotation of our scapula. We're doing

nothing to pull our scapula around our body, so that's not going to work.

Number 2. We do kind of a cross our body stretch this way, right. This is getting a bit of

this protraction around our body, ok.

This movement of the scapula out and around, but you know what happens? We get limited

by our posterior capsule in our shoulder

which is usually really tight in most people, especially if you're an athlete. So, this

kind of gets limited by shoulder, internal shoulder tightness.

So that doesn't make a good option. So the third thing we do is, we try to do a stretch

where we kind of hold on here and we sink down, right.

That's sort of our classic lat stretch. Again, it's a lat stretch. It's not really getting

that pulling the scapula around the body.

If you think about what these muscles in the back do in that area of the middle traps,

the lower traps, they pull the shoulder blades down and back and together.

So we've got to get them up, out and around. So the best way to do that is by setting up

something in front of us that allows us to do this.

I'm going to do it here on a cable machine. Don't worry. You do the exact same thing inside

of a doorway, the exact same thing.

You position yourself in between your doorway, or in this case I have my cables and you take

your right arm and you move it across your body

so we're getting againt that bit of protraction out in front of us. Take the left arm, and

you cross it over to the other one this way.

And then from here, you just sink back. See, because the movement is, you want the arms

to be pulled out in front of you.

If I have them pulled out in front of me, we're getting that protraction. We're getting

those shoulder blades pulled apart.

So here, in the doorway, I'm grabbing one frame of the door, I'm grabbing the other

frame of the door, and I sink back.

Now from here, here's the key point. If you want to get those middle traps and those lower

traps, especially the lower traps, what we want to do is

we want to elevate the shoulders because we want to depress them. We want to elevate the

shoulders.

And we want to do that by breathing in, letting your butt tuck under, breath in deep, and

lift your shoulders.

So, I'm sinking back, I'm breathing in and lifting the shoulders up at one time as I'm

letting my arms pull away.

And you can see, this is one of the greatest stretches you can possibly do to target that

really hard to reach area.

And you just hold it like you would a normal stretch for about 60 seconds or so if you

want to start causing some length changes.

So, guys, when we target these muscles, remember, every muscle has a function.

And in order to get at that muscle, you've got to basically reverse-engineer that function.

And if the function is to pull this way, we want to stretch it by getting it the other

way.

And if the function is to rotate it up, we want to do something to rotate it down. It's

all about putting science back in strength.

It's also about putting science back in stretching. If you found this helpful, guys, start using

it.

I'm promising you, you're going to start to feel a much bigger release in that area. Make

sure you leave a comment and a thumb's up.

And if you're looking for a training program that kind of covers everything, all the bases

from A to Z, and does it in an athletic way, this is what we talk about here,

let's train like an athlete, let's stretch like one also, head to ATHLEANX.COM right

now and grab our 90-Day Training program.

Alright guys, we'll be back here again in just a few days.