 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke, and welcome to another installment of Limber Up with Lance. Today, we're going to focus on shoulder mobility, so my shoulder's a little creaky right now. I want to walk through what it is that I like to do to keep it nice and loose, you know, feeling good, feeling strong, too. This is great to use before a workout, or it's great to use if you're just, you know, you're sitting around and you need a break from your workday or whatever or do this 20-minute routine, and you feel a lot better after. Really quickly, I want to go through the goals of this. So shoulder mobility tends to get limited when more tension happens. So the shoulder is just this joint over here, but it's determined, its mobility is determined by the joints that are next to it. So if I have poor shoulder mobility, you can pretty much guarantee that the pecs don't like to shut off, the lats don't like to shut off, and the thoracic spine, the upper back here, does not like to twist. Okay, so we're going to try to loosen all three of those things up during our exercises here. The first one we're going to do, and if you've seen my other videos, you probably know, we're going to do a rock back. We're going to tweak it a little bit, depending on if you've seen me do it before. First one, we're going to do three sets of five breaths. First one, you're going to start hands and knees. You're going to pull your belly up. You're going to rock your hips back, and you're going to bring your elbows down to the ground. We're just going to hold there, hold that belly up for five breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth, keep the belly up as you exhale. Don't, you know, there's this urge to sink. We don't want to sink. And I feel really good because I can tell when I breathe in, my back is expanding. That's a good sign, good first step for us. If you can't pause as long as I pause, that's okay, but you're going to want to work on it. Make sure your head's not falling down toward the ground, and make sure you're not looking forward ahead of you. You want your neck to be just like an extension of the rest of your torso. Good, and we're going to relax. Okay, so that's the first one. Now, if the shoulders are limited, we kind of want to introduce some asymmetry into the torso to help it start moving, help it start loosening up. So we're going to do the same thing. We're going to set up the same way. Exhale, belly comes up slightly. Remember, not crunching down like this. It's just belly comes up slightly. Rock the hips back. We're going to bring both elbows down, and then we're going to reach the left hand away from the body. Okay, when you reach away, I don't want you to push yourself to the right. I want you to let your left shoulder come up towards the ceiling, and your right shoulder come down toward the ground, just like a twist. Okay, I'm going to do the same thing, five breaths. You should notice more air go into your left side, and less going into the right, and rest. Okay, cool. So that's two sets. Last set, you may have guessed this. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, but last set, we're going to flip the arms. So same thing. Ready, hands and knees, belly up. Rock the hips back, elbow down, right arm away. Remember, I'm not leaning over. I'm just twisting in place. And get a sense for how easy it is relative to the other arm. I generally find it a lot harder to breathe in this position, and that's actually really normal, because of the natural asymmetry of our bodies. One last one. All right, so that's number one. Exercise number two is going to be a clamshell variation, but we're going to throw in some rotation as well. You're going to lay on your left side, support your head with your left hand, because we don't want the neck to be jacking up here. Knees start stacked, and then the right knee pushes ahead of the left. I'm just looking down at it, and I can see my kneecap, my right kneecap is ahead of my left knee. That's about how much you want there. From there, I'm going to bring the right knee up just slightly, so I know it's supporting itself. I'm trying to shut off this right inner thigh. So if you only feel that, see if you can feel more of the right glute. Now the legs are done. We're just going to hold there. We're going to take the right hand, reach it out, and then we're going to make an arc and reach back. I'm just going to go back, not all the way, because if I go all the way, I've got to lose my hips, right? We want to make sure the right knee stays ahead of the left one, and we're just going to hold right here for five breaths. Remember what I said earlier? We're trying to loosen the pecs, so you should feel a little stretch in your right back here. And we're trying to get some thoracic rotation. That's what we're doing. Twisted. I think that was four. I'm always losing count on these. Beautiful. Okay. Quick break. Give that glute just a second of rest, and then we're going to go again. Same thing. Right knee comes forward. I've just got my belly pulled back slightly. I don't want it sticking out like this. I need to keep my ribs tucked in. Okay. Right knee ahead, right knee up, right hand back. And I want you to try on your exhales to sink back even further without moving that knee. You might feel some left groin muscle as well. That's good too. Last one here. Beautiful. I'm really feeling like I'm loosening up, and hopefully you feel the same way. Let's just go one more. Three is usually the magic number here. If your neck doesn't feel quite right, you might want to try a pillow. With the pecs and the lats tightening up, sometimes the neck tightens up as well. So we want to focus on keeping that relaxed as well. Last one. That's three. And yes, we only do this on this side because the torso is asymmetrical. Our organs, our hearts, only on the left side. So we tend to shut down the right side of the chest more than we shut down the left side of the chest. So we're really trying to reverse that, open up this right chest wall. All right. Exercise number three is the rock back with rotation. So you've maybe seen a rotation on your hands and knees before. I like to throw in the rock back because I want to position the spine as well. So belly comes up, hips rock back, not all the way, just part of the way. And then I take, let's do left hand first. I take fingertips behind the head. I'm going to bring my left elbow down to my right knee. And then I'm going to reverse it, twisted. Okay. Make sure I'm not swaying side to side to get my rotation. It's just a pure twist. We're going to do 10 on each side. Really try to get that last little millimeter of motion when he gets to the top. If you feel super stiff as well, try to exhale as you're coming up. That gets the air out of the way and allows you to twist. Okay. And then we're going to switch sides. I kind of like to reset and then back and then 10 more. And then next one, we're going to stay hands and knees. And we're just going to do a quadruped row. So I like to pull the belly up as well. We got to remember, we don't want the spine to be arching because that reduces our thoracic mobility and therefore our shoulder mobility. So start hands and knees, pull the belly up. And then we're just going to alternate body weight rows. I like to like put my hand on my chest like this. That rotation tends to feel a little bit better. 10 on each side. Like that was four. Nice. All right. Next one's going to be a plank to downward dog. We're going to start loading the pushing muscles a little bit more. So we're going to start and we got to talk about a nice plank first. So body is straight. Again, belly is pulled up. If my back is arched or my hips are sagging or my head is sagging, now this is going to work. So make sure you don't do those. Make sure the hips aren't sagging. The back is an arched and the head's not falling down. Okay. So we're going to come back that with pulling the belly up and even pushing the base of the neck towards the ceiling the whole time. And that's how we're going to hold our plank. And then from there, we're just going to push back to get our heels to the ground and then we come back to the plank. And that's one. We're going to do 10. Try best to keep your knees straight. This can work for a calf inhibition as well. Don't get crazy on the stretch. And the big thing is, especially if you're looking for shoulder mobility, when you push back, you don't want to shrug. You want to push with your armpits, not with your neck. I'm going to say that. Six, seven, eight, nine, cool. All right. Next one's going to look a lot like the downward dog, but we're going to, it's called the bare walk. It's going to be a little bit more movement here. So we're going to set up in kind of a downward dog position. I'm going to be pretty scrunched up. I'm trying to get both heels to the ground if I can. I take a step with one leg. Legs stay straight. And then I take a step with the opposite arm. Okay. It doesn't have to be crazy steps. Just go nice and slow. Make sure we get good twist. You don't want a whole lot of shifting, but a little bit is okay. Not a lot of side to side. And we'll just go back and forth. You don't need a whole lot of room for this one. I usually do about 10 steps on each side, but I haven't counted it all. So we'll see how many we end up doing. I'm just going to go down and back one more time before my shirt falls on. Geez. Again, make sure you're not using the neck, pushing with the armpits the whole time. Nice. All right. Our second to last exercise is going to be the get up to hand. If you're familiar with the Turkish get up, it's like an abbreviated version of that. You're going to land it back, one leg bent, one leg straight, or one arm straight, other leg straight, and then the other arm is about parallel. You're going to punch up with the straight arm. See my shoulder come off the ground, turns me over onto this side, and then I pull up to the elbow. This is the get up to elbow. We're going to go to the hand though. Just straighten that arm out. Okay. This really drives the shoulder flexion. And we challenge the mobility on the straight arm. If you don't have that mobility, or you feel yourself shrugging, just stop at the elbow part. Okay. But we're going to try to do five reps up to the hand. Nice and slow. I'm going to scoot a little. I'll switch. I'll give you a back side view here. And then our last exercise is going to be the offset push-up. So push-ups tend to be friendlier than bench presses for their shoulders, because they don't tighten the pecs quite as much as long as you do them correctly. We got to make sure that when we finish, start hands and knees here. When we finish, we want to make the arms nice and long, so the upper back gets kind of stretched out. The shoulder blades come apart and wrap around your body. Now, the offset refers to your stance. So I'm going to put one hand further ahead of the other one. And I'm going to let my body kind of follow that motion. I want a little bit of twist in this. If this, if you don't have the strength to do it from the ground without, you know, really, you know, I need you to be able to get the arms long. So if you can't get them on the, can't get them long when you're on the ground, you've got to elevate your hands, maybe in a rack, maybe on a bench, maybe on a couch, something like that. Okay, we're starting in that good plank position with the hands offset. I come on down. Notice my chest is kind of turning towards the camera here, because my left hand is further towards my feet. And we're just going to do 10. This is hard. You can just stop at five. Cool. And then we're just going to switch. Other side. Very good. And that's our shoulder mobility warm-up thing. Hopefully you're not getting stiff after the push-up. You might need to do this warm-up a few times, not just, you know, it can feel like magic to some people sometimes. But sometimes you need a little repetitive treatment, we'll say, for the stiffness that you have. If you've got major shoulder problems, you're probably not going to get too much out of stuff that you find on the internet. I'm trying to help as many people as I can with this program. That's why I wrote it the way that I did. But it can still be, there can still be nuances that are important. Like if you have frozen shoulder or something like that, you're probably not going to do very well with a lot of the downward dog stuff. So just take all this with a grain of salt. I hope it helps modify things if you need to, if you know how to. And if not, feel free to hire me for coaching. Thanks for watching. If you learned something, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when I release new videos. If you need something else to watch, you can watch my other videos in the Limber Up series, or I have some. You might be interested in my Buttwink video where we talk about hip mobility when squatting. It's long, there's a lot of detail in there, but that's the idea. It's comprehensive, right? I feel like I didn't leave anything out. So if you're looking to take a deep dive into hip mobility, that might be where you want to go next.