Treat your shoulders to a gentle mobilization to make the joints more flexible and the muscles supple again. Use the following exercises, which you can best take part in while reading:
Circling shoulders relaxed
The exercises are quite easy to understand: Start by turning your shoulders backward in large, gentle movements. You should make several passes – but please make sure you circle in a relaxed, large and enjoyable manner.
This mobilizes, on the one hand, the bony parts of the joint and on the other hand also makes the muscles more supple, which stabilizes and encompasses the shoulder joint. Tension and tension in the shoulders and neck can be reduced. You may already be feeling how this area becomes more flexible.
Later, as a variation, you can bend your elbows and reach for your shoulder joints with your fingertips. Then paint circles in the air with your elbows extended sideways – sometimes getting bigger, sometimes getting smaller, circling forwards and backward. Here, too, several passes. In my yoga classes, I practice this for 2-3 minutes.
Actively raise and lower shoulders
Next up is the shoulder-neck muscle. This muscle stretches when the shoulders drop forward, causing it to cramp. This can be felt on a firm neck.
You can also do this exercise anywhere, anytime. It consists of two parts: an active tension of the muscles and a subsequent passive relaxation. If you have ever practiced progressive muscle relaxation according to Jacobsen (PMR), then you are familiar with this principle.
Start by actively lifting your shoulders. Run them back and up. Tense your neck and shoulders – and hold this tension for 3-5 soft breaths. Then exhale and let your shoulders drop backward. Take a little break and enjoy how the shoulder-neck area slowly relaxes. Then repeat three more runs.
You can round off this sequence by gently circling your shoulders.
Strengthening the shoulder muscles
In the typical sitting position, the back slumps round and the shoulder joints fall forward. As a result, the muscles that connect the shoulder blades to the spine are too long in stretching and thus become cramped over time.
Therefore, the aim of this sequence is to give a strengthening impulse to the muscles and to pull the shoulder blades back towards the spine.
For this, you need some space to the rear. First, fold your fingers behind your buttocks and roll your shoulders back down. Then raise your stretched arms backward and upwards as far as this seems comfortable. Do you feel the centering force between the shoulder blades and the gentle stretch in the front of the chest between the shoulders and sternum? Breathe there with relish.
Hold your raised arms for a few deep and soft breaths – then dissolve again. You are welcome to repeat this exercise. Please take care not to let your head sink too far forwards or to round your back while doing this.
Conclusion
A tense neck and pain in the shoulders are commonplace and due to our one-sided movements and postures. With the exercises presented, it is possible to bring the shoulders and the surrounding muscles back into a gentle movement and thereby relieve tension.
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