Sebastian Brosche · 7 min · 1,500 words
Previously titled: Sleeper Crank Stretch Part 2
Hey guys, Joel Kriska here, Sport Physiotherapist. Today we're going to take a secondary look at ways to stretch the posterior aspect of the shoulder. Now previously I've shown you the sleeper stretch which is laying on your side almost giving yourself a gentle burrata plata. For some people that doesn't work and it's like the structures on the back they're not tight, they're actually just weak.
And so we've got a different approach here that we want to try and do. And essentially what we're going to do is put ourselves in that same position and internally rotate the muscle or sorry internally rotate the joint which is stressing the external rotators, but we're going to put a load through it. And essentially what that does is strengthen the muscle in a lengthened position so that the the muscle unit is not sort of freaking out and trying to hang on for dear life. I guess assuming that it's going to be torn or injured.
So basically what we're trying to do is rather than sit here and passively stretch it, we're going to actively strengthen it through those ranges where we would get a stretch and that helps create a mobile joint where the muscles are strong and you thus increase flexibility. And you can see this sometimes say in hamstring injuries where I pull a hamstring which we're going to get to at some point where I'll show you how to strengthen some of those and gain flexibility at the same time. But when we have these hamstring injuries, people get say a small tear to that injury or to that muscle group. And so what they try to do instinctively is to stretch it and stretch it and stretch it when in fact what we have to try and do is strengthen it.
And in particular we have to strengthen it in those outer regions where there's the most stress on that muscle where it's more likely to injure again and that's where we create this robust muscle unit that can handle flexibility but it's also strong. This is absolutely imperative for jiu-jitsu for some of the positions that we get into. So let's get right to it. The first one we're going to do here is laying on our side like we did with the sleeper stretch.
And so we're going to take some tubing. We create a little loop here with some form of resistance on the end. Again if it's too strong you can always adjust your leg so it's better to go heavier with this one than lighter. We're going to take a loop and put it around our bottom side foot and lay on our side like we did with the sleeper stretch.
So again you may want to have a pillow here if you're ahead that's up to you but ultimately we want our shoulder stacked close to top shoulder over bottom and you could open up a little bit but just don't be too far open. It really renders the stretch sort of this weird ineffective position. So close to side stack elbow at shoulder height bring my knee nice and tight right up to my chest and I'm going to hang on to this band. It's really important that you have a firm wrist here almost like a choking wrist because what we want to try and do is really avoid this.
This loses a lot of power in that area so because this is going to be high resistance pretty quick. So we're going to keep a firm wrist elbow at shoulder height stacked on our side knee up to our chest. To initiate the stretch or strengthen depending on how you want to look at it we're going to straighten our bottom leg and putting a ton of tension on this band. I'm going to slowly and controlled lower this hand down putting the shoulder into internal rotation but because I've got resistance here I'm actually strengthening those muscles.
I'm going to bring my knee up all the way and pull up to the start position. If I need to I can help with my hand but I'm going to straighten my leg let go here if I need to and slowly lower down as far as I can go. Now that's how we use the band to get this sideline internal rotation. We could also do it for shoulders that are stiff dropping into internal rotation when the elbow is up at 90 degrees of abduction.
So almost like I'm doing a lateral delt raise some people like myself are quite stiff into internal rotation in this position. So again if we look at my left hand here and then I do this hand you'll notice there's a little bit of a difference in terms of how far they drop. Okay so this one when I looked at it's about 80 degrees and this one's about 60 or 70 degrees but hopefully you can kind of see where my fingertips are on the white panel in there. Now what I'm going to do in this scenario rather than laying on my side because I have no problems laying on my side I do have a bit of stiffness like I said in this abducted position.
So I'm going to lay on my back my elbows at shoulder height and I'm going to set it up exactly the same so my right knee the one with the band around my foot is going to come right up to my chest and I'm going to hang on to this band with again a nice firm wrist. Now what I need to focus on here because I can't necessarily help with my hand I need to find the appropriate amount of sort of tension through this band so just start off light if you need to you can always increase it because the one difference between the side line one and the one here where I'm laying on my back is that when I'm on my side my shoulder blade is pinned I don't need to think about where it is. This one I have to think about throughout the whole exercise pulling the shoulder back and engaging it into that strong posture position like we've talked about for all these other shoulder exercises. Okay so I'm going to engage my shoulder blade setting it I'm going to step on the band getting lots of tension through here and keeping a firm wrist I'm going to slowly lower it down all the way.
Now again you might not get full range on this right away so I reset bring my hand up and then stomp on the band and slowly lower all the way down until you feel a stretch. Okay and you might have to do this four or five six times until it slowly lowers down but the really neat thing about the stretch is that if you do it properly it help gains you flexibility almost instantaneously. So again if I look at this position where my elbows are up at shoulder height like my scarecrow position you'll now notice that my hands are actually very similar versus before there was quite a difference between them and now they're both around that 80 degree mark so it's pretty cool. And again this is important for many reasons one we want to make sure that when we're working on posture to strengthen our shoulder girdle we want to loosen up the back area of the shoulder as much as possible to allow that glenohumeral joint to sit back in the pocket to have the scapula sit back on the thoracic spine so we have a nice strong base to then lift and engage those now really working rotator cuff muscles and then we can build up on that with some of the other sort of more superficial mover muscles.
It's also important to make sure that we have proper flexibility whether in this position or this position because we end up in these positions throughout rolling and again if we're here and we don't have the flexibility we'll end up tapping probably a lot sooner than we would on this side to a barato plata or in this case a kimura okay so it's really good injury prevention we're not going to get in this position have the shoulder dumped forward and then do more damage to the rotator cuff or any other aspects of the shoulder of the anterior aspect of it and it's also good again so we're trying to think about strengthening the shoulder mobility of the shoulder and injury prevention of the shoulder i really hope you've enjoyed it i will make sure that if we have any other questions about the shoulder please email me and i will see you on the mats real soon thanks again have a good one
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