Today I’d like to show a stretch that can be done in an office environment, and it’s called a doorway stretch.
I talk to many of my patients about this one because many are sitting at a desk all day, with poor posture and monitor height. If that fits your environment and you have the pain across the top of the shoulder blades and in the in the neck, this is a stretch that I encourage you to do throughout your work day.
How to start the doorway stretch.
- Take your phone and set an alarm.
- Pick a time whether it will be 40 minutes, 50 minutes, 30 minutes
- When that alarm goes off you get up into 15 seconds of this stretch
We call it a doorway stretch because you are going to do in the doorway and it’s designed to stretch the front muscles, your chest muscles, and to contract your muscles that are in the back side, around your shoulder blades and your traps on top of your shoulders. As well to alleviate the tension and stress in the pain associated with sitting at a desk.
So now what we’re going to do is put your feet adjacent into the doorway, grab hold of the doorframe about shoulder height, and then lean forward. And as you lean forward your arms will stretch out and then keep your head tilted backwards.
You’re stretching out the chest muscles at this point and then contracting the shoulder blades together holding that for momentarily and then leaning back into the stretch and stretching out the chest.
This works to correct the rounding of the shoulders and the rounding of the thoracic spine.
As you’re leaning into the front of the stretch, or doorway, you’re working at stretching the chest muscles and the PEC muscles keeping the head tilted back. This is opposite of the poor posture of sitting at a desk that most people have.
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