Posts in Shoulders
Shoulder Rotation

How we tend to hold our shoulders throughout the day can affect all around the upper body - from the hands to the neck to the upper spine. If we tend to hold the shoulders in one position much of the time (think typing, reading, driving, utensil use, smartphone use), it's important to spend a lot of time moving the arms in the other direction. In this class, we'll talk about "neutral" for the shoulder rotation (watching the "elbow pits") and explore ways to move and stretch the parts around the shoulder so that they can "unstick" from each other.

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Climbing the Walls

Putting your hands on the ground and carrying some of your weight with the arms is common with many natural movements and exercises. However, when the load is great, it is easy to skip over tense and underused parts of us, and it is difficult to see the details of our movement and learn how to develop better muscle use and stability. We can practice many of the same movements by taking the load off and putting our hands on the wall. The wall is a great place to use your arms in varied ways and it is also a great place to practice using and moving your hips.

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Shoulder Mobility Play

Resistance to movement in small parts of the body (ie: the fingers) have an effect on the larger motions. We can observe how hand tension can result in neck tension and vice versa and also how tension in one area can cause us to compensate and use other parts of the body differently. In this case we'll play a game for shoulder mobility, and then we'll work on getting more movement in all the parts of the chain from the fingers to the neck.

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RE-shaping Downward Dog

A look at how alignment can help us move more of our body in our physical activities. This class will focus on the common yoga pose, downward dog. We'll see how limitations in our ranges of motion are causing us to avoid moving certain joints and how using alignment markers can help us get more movement and strength overall.

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