Which Way Should Your Shoulder Blades Go

by Baxter

Let’s talk about the shoulder blades today. Recently, while evaluating my newest batch of teacher trainees during their teaching intensive, I was surprised to hear the instructions to “move the shoulder blades toward the pelvis” when the arms were in the overhead position, such as in Urdhva Hastasana. I heard it in Warrior 1, in Utkatasana, in Downward-Facing Dog, and virtually anytime my young wards had the arms overhead. And I flinched each time they uttered it, which just about every one of them did for the four classes they taught. Without naming names, I should mention “always move your shoulder blades down your back” is an instruction that I have heard on many occasions from very experienced teachers. These trainees did not hear me utter such words, but I realized that some of their instructors were still using this outdated understanding. This is too simplistic, as it is not what actually needs to happen for healthy movement of the arms overhead and it can actually restrict the mobility of the shoulder joint for most students.

If you look at photos of Mr. Iyengar in the classic “Light on Yoga,” you can see that he is not doing that. His shoulder blades are clearly moving towards his arms, not away from them. (I refer you to the following plates: 12, 23, 42, 91 and 96.) So what is going on here, or more accurately, what is going on with the shoulder blades when the arms go overhead?

When your arms are hanging at your sides, your shoulder blades have several common ways they move: sliding upwards is called elevation, such as when you shrug your shoulders; sliding slightly downwards, called depression, like when you tug the bottom of a shirt downwards; sliding them apart or side ways, called protraction or abduction, like when you give yourself a hug; and squeezing them together called retraction or adduction, like when doing the Cobra with a doorknob.

Shoulder Blade in Neutral (Mountain Pose)

In these four basic movements, the shoulder blades don’t rotate much. Instead, they slide around in the general way they sit on your back upper rib cage. But in addition to those movements, there are two more movements that require a bit more imagination on your part, since we can’t quite see what is going on under the skin and muscles. The first happens when you take your arms overhead, whether forward and up or out the sides and up. It is called upward rotation of the scapula.  There is usually a bit of elevation of the entire shoulder blade from its neutral position, like in Mountain Pose, and a bit of protraction. But more noticeable is the out and up swing of the shoulder blade that allows for the greatest reach of the arms overhead.

Rotating Shoulder Blade

The opposite action is required to get the arms back down to your sides, and is called downward rotation. It is likely that a bit of depression of the shoulder blade and retraction also accompanies this action.

My teacher Donald Moyer refers to the rotational movement of the shoulder blades as “traffic circles.” Depending on which way the arms are moving or how they are positioned on the body, the traffic around the outer edges of the circle will flow in one direction the other. As an example of how you might imagine this, you might start with your awareness at the lower tip of your right shoulder blade. You can likely reach around and feel this with your fingers of your left hand. When your arm goes overhead, the traffic flows up the outer edge, across the top edge from right to left, and down the inner edge back to the lower tip of the shoulder blade. You might have to imagine there is a central pivot point in the shoulder blade, and the traffic causes the shoulder blade to rotate around that point. Then the traffic flows in the opposite direction as the arm comes down to Mountain pose position.

You might be asking yourself if there are times when saying “move the shoulder blades down the back” would be appropriate? And the answer is yes. For instance, with new students who have hunched shoulder blades that are semi-permanently elevated and forward rounded, you might have to ask, show and encourage them to depress the shoulder blades in Mountain pose.  I will keep a slight feeling of downward movement even as the arms approach the 90 degree mark, such as in Warrior 2 pose. In Warrior 2, there is a bit of upward rotation of the blades, but mostly protraction or widening away from the spine. The downward movement is helpful for those with the tendency to hike the shoulders in these lower arm positions.

But so what if you draw your shoulder blades down the back when they are overhead? What’s the big problem? Well, as your arms and shoulder blades swing up, the upper arm bone, the humerus, rolls slightly outwards, so as to have a better contact with the shoulder blade. If you then pull the “shoulder blades towards the pelvis”, the shoulder blades start to downwardly rotate, the arm bone pulls down with it, and the shoulder joint gets narrowed and pinched, meaning that the soft, non-bone structures can get pinched in an unhealthy way. I dislike demonstrating this “wrong” way of doing it for my students, because it quite literally pinches my gleno-humeral joint.

Having a clearer understanding of how the shoulder blades change positions on the rib cage will be very helpful to you as you try some of the shoulder openers we share with you because so many of them work more effectively if you encourage the upward rotation, protraction and elevation of the scapulae I have shared with you here today (see Featured Sequence: Opening Tight Shoulders and future posts about the individual poses). 

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Friday Q A Painful Shoulder

Q: I have developed a very painful shoulder issue. I finally stopped doing shoulder stand, down/up dog, and head stand. I instead switched to "western" solutions, rehab. I am finding that doing Yoga that is not modified for older bodies is dangerous. Is there a form of Yoga that does not require us to drink the Kool-Aid?

A: To answer this question more fully and accurately it would be helpful to know exactly what type of “painful shoulder issue” you have developed (diagnosis) as well as what your current “western rehab program” is like now.

As a physical therapist, when someone in pain comes to see me, I know it is important to try to pinpoint the MAIN area of dysfunction as well as the SECONDARY areas of discomfort. Sometimes the place that hurts the most isn’t the cause of the pain (like painful shoulder) but the pain may be coming from another area of your body. It is very common for neck pain to cause shoulder pain, poor postural habits definitely can cause and exacerbate shoulder pain. Non-ergonomic work stations and driving can also absolutely contribute to painful shoulder as well as recreational activities that you may do, such as rowing for crew, a lot of overhead home repairs, sleep positions and a bed that may be ready for replacement, significant pruning of trees in your garden, backpacking—I think you get the picture.

Usually yoga does not cause pain, but yoga done with structural instabilities and imbalances can exacerbate weak areas and make pain "appear" so we blame yoga for the problem. But the problem is bigger than yoga. My opinion as a yoga teacher and PT is that the teacher doesn’t fit the student to the asana; the asana is there for the student to explore and to find their own release and expansion. In an interview on the Yoga Dork blog Power Your Yoga: Creating Space for Exploring the Present Judith Lasater discusses this very point very eloquently. If you are an experienced student and you know that certain poses cause you difficulties, it is your responsibility to talk to the teacher before class and explain that you have this shoulder problem and if you need to modify a pose it is because you are trying to protect yourself from injury. If the teacher is not agreeable to this plan, then my advice is that you stop practicing with this particular teacher. Now if you are new to yoga and do not feel that you have the experience to modify poses in your class independently, you can ask whether it is possible for you to meet privately so the teacher can teach you ways to modify poses that cause you discomfort or pain.

I always tell my students that I would rather be interrupted in a class to assist a student with a modification than to have that student silently suffering—often their particular issue may also be felt by other students. But some people are too shy to speak up even though the class culture encourages this. (All yoga classes become their own mini ecosystems and there is an exchange and dialogue—not necessarily through words—continuously between students and teachers.)

There are certain rigidities in different styles of yoga that may be less amenable to students who are not all following the same instructions in class. In this instance it might be important for you to stop and reassess why you are studying this particular type of yoga or with this particular teacher. Sometimes it's not the style of yoga but the particular teacher that you may not resonate with. Again, no one can force you to do a pose that is painful or unsafe for you to do.

I would also recommend that you give the rehab professionals that you are working with pictures of the asanas that are currently difficult for you. They can then break down the poses biomechanically to target specific areas of tightness and weakness that are preventing healthy integrated biomechanics in the performance of the asana. 

The poses that you listed as having difficulty with (dog pose, up dog, shoulder stand, headstand) all involve significant weight bearing through the arms, cervical and thoracic spine. Downward-Facing Dog pose has many modifications that you can substitute for the “traditional” pose. For example, if your difficulty with Downward-Facing Dog pose is shoulder range of motion, then it might be better to go back to working with the preparatory position: on all fours, with appropriate shoulder stabilization, torso stabilization, cervical and thoracic neutral positioning and supportive abdominals BEFORE you push up into dog pose. If you are deficient in shoulder range of motion, you might want to practice Half Dog pose at the Wall (or with a table top) to work into stability at 90 degrees shoulder flexion first. Then return to the floor with preparatory Dog, progress to knees off the floor with rocking and then slowly work back into Dog pose using a chair first then returning to the floor. (This progression is difficult to explain without me actually seeing you and watching how you move.)

As to Shoulderstand, a lovely variation is chair Shoulderstand, which takes almost all the weight off the shoulders, and with a bolster under the shoulders, the head and neck are much less weighted. Headstand is a different problem because even with using a Headstander prop or two chairs to unweight your head and cervical spine, this pose puts a lot of weight into your shoulders. So if the problem is truly from your shoulder, I would recommend that you do not do Headstand until you are pain free or, if the studio where you practice has wall ropes, perhaps you can have your teacher instruct you on how to do the inversion without bearing with through your head or shoulders.

Good luck in your explorations!

—Shari

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