Friday Q&A: Tight Shoulders

Q: I recently taught a class to a bunch of folks who work out weekly with a trainer. None of them had done yoga and most of their training focuses on strength building and weight loss - stretching seems to fall to the least priority. For just that reason they loved my session and I worked hard to share small ideas for home practice. However, I had one student who had bulky muscles and in particular found most shoulder openings exceptionally difficult - even though it was exactly what he needed. Any suggestions? In particular, the arm position of Garudasana, eagle arms, was virtually impossible. Do you have any ideas for modifications or more attainable shoulder openers?

A: This question got me thinking about how important good functioning shoulder joints are: So today, I’d like to discuss what “tight shoulders” mean, why some people have them, why they are a problem and what in general can be done about them.

When I feel someone has “tight shoulders,” I usually mean they have some limited range of motion at the gleno-humeral joint, where the upper arm bone (the humerus) meets the shoulder blade (or scapula), as well as limitations in how the scapula moves on the rib cage to assist the arms in moving about.

The most obvious example of this is when you (or your student) take the arms overhead, as in Mountain Pose with arms overhead (Urdhva Hastasana). If your arms don’t end up lined up with the side plane of the body, even with the ears, or can’t get parallel to each other up there, or the elbows begin to bend a lot, even when you attempt to keep them straight, you may have tight shoulders. This impacts your ability to do these kinds of arms-overhead poses, including Downward-Facing Dog pose, Warrior I and others, not to mention making everyday activities, like getting something off a high shelf or changing an overhead light bulb, difficult.

And tight shoulders could mean having trouble moving the arms in other directions as well, such as forward and up, out to the sides and up, across the chest or back behind you, too.  The student highlighted here sounds like he had trouble with what I call doing a “bear hug” on yourself, the first action needed to get into Eagle pose arms.

There can be many different reasons why some people have limited range of motion in the shoulder joint area, from a skeleton that limits the actions desired to an acute injury (like my climbing injury that has limited my left arm reach overhead) or a chronic wear and tear injury. Rotator cuff injuries are common examples of this, where one of the muscle tendons of this group of four muscles is injured and inflamed. Body builders or even casual weight lifters can develop so much muscle bulk in the deltoids and other shoulder muscles that they end up with limited movement in this area.

One of our great advantages as humans is our amazing hands that can do strong as well as fine movement activities, and those hands are attached to a shoulder joint that has lots of potential for movement. If we have lost some of that for any of the reasons listed above, the yoga asana practice can help us regain some of the lost movement. In general, there are many yoga shoulder openers that could be used to design a special practice for those with tight shoulders. I’d recommend doing such a sequence at least three times a week and holding each pose for at least 60 to 90 seconds to encourage the permanent changes in movement desired. Pictured here is one way to modify Eagle pose arms to head in the right direction towards the full pose.

Next week, I’ll share an entire shoulder opener sequence with you, so stay tuned for that. 

—Baxter