Tight Upper Back Stretches
Tight Upper Back Stretches
What causes a tight upper back?
You may feel pain or tightness in your upper back due to a number of reasons. Overuse, muscles strains, or injuries to the structures in your upper back could cause discomfort. Most often, poor posture can affect your upper back muscles and create kyphosis (hunch back curve in upper back). This is common with desk jobs and hunching over to look at our cell phones from day to day.
Do you have a tight upper back?
Do you feel pain radiating across the top of your shoulders and in the top of your spine?
Try these rhomboid muscle diagonal stretches.
Imagine that your body is in in a rectangular box – stand with good posture:
- Point your hand across your body and to the opposite top corner of the box – gently apply pressure between the elbow and shoulder to feel a slight stretch in your upper back/shoulder
- Point your hand directly across your body – gently apply pressure between the elbow and shoulder to feel a slight stretch in your upper back/shoulder
- Point your hand across your body and downward to the opposite bottom corner of the box – reaching your opposite hand over top your arm, gently apply pressure between the elbow and shoulder to feel a slight stretch in your upper back/shoulder
These are 3 ways to stretch out your rhomboid muscles and relieve tension in your upper back and shoulder area. If you feel any pain, do NOT attempt these stretches any further and contact your health care professional.
Julia de Reijke RKin, CSEP-CPT, BASc Kinesiology (Hons), DipFTHP