Middle Back Exercise (The Open Book)
My name is Dr Jeff Ulery and today I want open up mobility in the middle back. Wback. We kind of do just one or really one direction.. forward and back. That’s two directions, okay. We’ve lost some of our ability to rotate in that mid back which can put more pain in the neck, shoulders and in the low back area. It can obviously cause a lot of discomfort in the midback. So what I want to do is show you an exercise this is kind of an altered or modified version of open book. I’m going to ask Judy help me with this so if you just make both of your arms straight. I have her lying on her side. The bottom leg is straight, and the top leg is bent. I have placed a foam roller so she’s resting her knee on the roller. The goal is when she rotates she wants to try to keep that knee in contact with the foam roller, right, The the purpose of this is to activate the muscles of the back to get the rotation. There’s a lot of what appears to be movement in the shoulder, but we want to limit movement in the shoulder. Really try to isolate the mid back. One of the mistakes that can be made is you can overactivate the muscles in the back when trying to pull that shoulder back and down. I would strongly recommend not doing that I did that once and uh literally had a charlie horse in uncomfortable. What we want to do is she going to start here kind of in a neutral position and then she’s going to activate the muscles here which is going to pull which is going to rotate her spine and she just is doing a really good job of following top hand on top of the bottom arm. Then she’s just going to let that arm go back and rest. Just let the weight of that arm not trying to..she’s not pulling that arm back. She’s just allowing it to work with gravity and pull back. Then she’s going to reverse that and come back to neutral. And then she do that again. That was really good, okay. Rotate.. let it fall back and then come right back perfect. So typically, I’d recommend somebody do this 10 times each side, and you can add that to a lot of different exercises or mobility exercises from the mid back. This is one of my favorites, and it can really helpsthe shoulder as well because the more you get that midback rotation. Actually, it will free up your shoulders a lot of times, so thanks for joining us, and have a great day!