Shoulder blade squeeze exercise · Neck pain · St. Louis · Regen.MD physiotherapy
Shoulder blade squeeze exercise:
take the load off your neck
The shoulder blade squeeze trains, at home, the muscles between your shoulder blades, which take strain off the neck. Standing with elbows bent at your sides, set both blades back and down toward your back pockets. Five seconds each, ten in a set.
Only the exercises your physician has ticked on your home plan are yours to do. Twice daily is the rhythm unless the written plan says something different.
Step by step: shoulder blade squeeze exercise
- Starting position. Standing, elbows bent and resting against your ribs.
- The motion. Set both shoulder blades back and down toward your back pockets, like closing a pencil in the crease between them.
- How much. Five seconds per squeeze, ten in a set.
What the shoulder blade squeeze does for tissue repair
The neck hangs off the shoulder girdle. When the muscles between the blades are weak, the neck muscles take up the slack all day, most of all at a desk. Building the base below the neck is part of getting it ready for any treatment.
Fresh from an injection? Read this first
After a PRP or other orthobiologic injection in your neck, the treated tissue needs a protected stretch of days before it is asked to work. Your physician tells you when this exercise comes back. When it does, start with fewer repetitions and build to the full dose over the following visits. Loading in steps like this is how the repair signal from the injection turns into stronger tissue.
More on that: why load is the treatment an injection cannot supply.
Form errors we correct most often
- Shrugging toward the ears. The direction is toward the back pockets.
- Puffing the chest and arching the low back to fake it.
- Freezing your breath during the five seconds.
Signs that mean stop and phone us
Feeling the muscle work, a gentle pull, or some next-day stiffness is normal. Call us at (314) 295-3000 if you notice:
- Pain that turns sharp or stabbing
- A pain score that climbs 2 or more points and stays up longer than an hour
- New numbness, tingling or loss of strength
- Feeling dizzy, or your eyesight changing
Call 911, not the clinic, for chest pain, a hard time breathing or passing out.
Tracking what changes
Keep a short log: a check mark for each session and one pain score per day. Hand it over at each appointment; your technician tallies the sessions and has you perform one repetition so your form can be corrected. At each re-check you also repeat the same function questionnaire, and if your physician orders it, a Kinetisense 3D motion scan, so the change is measured instead of guessed.
What to remember
- Toward the back pockets.
- Ribs quiet, low back neutral.
- Breathe the whole way through.
Show us you have it: Before you go, hold one squeeze while you talk to us, so we know you can breathe through it. If a point is fuzzy, say so and we walk through it again with you.
The rest of the neck series
Related reading: pinched nerve in the neck: treatment without surgery, why the neck and shoulder have to be treated together.
Where this fits: the Regen.MD physiotherapy program, physician-directed rehab paired with our regenerative care. A physician must be in the building and reachable within moments before any treatment begins.