Alright, this is Athena Jezik and we're gonna continue this series today with some
shoulder work. A lot of us carry a lot of
stress in the shoulders.
The shoulders tie into the neck.
Sometimes makes the neck stiff and sore.
So anyway we just basically, like in the previous videos I've
shown is just get a feel for what's going on
with the muscle around the scapula.
The scapula is the shoulder blade
That way you can tell
how tight the muscles are,
if there's any twisting in them,
just what the work needs to
do for them.
and you also want to go along the shoulder blade and check the muscles
there.
And if they feel fairly pliable and good then that's good. If they have some hard spots
or bumps or they feel
like washboards then you know you have
something to deal with. Over on the right side is a little bit
bumpier.
It's been probably used more.
Oftentimes one side of the body will be more developed than the other so you want to
keep that in mind.
Sometimes there is just more
muscle density
on one side than the other.
Okay now to get
the shoulder worked nice and deep you wanna go
underneath it.
There's ways of doing it and you can put your hand up here but
some people are pretty short down in the anterior
deltoid area. That makes it kind of painful.
And so rather than doing
it painfully for anybody I just avoid doing that particular thing and
instead I
will slip my hand under the shoulder
this way and I can slip the shoulder upward.
And you can see the rise and fall of the scapula
as that goes.
It's good to shake a little bit if you can do gentle shaking
and I'm just pushing up and down on her shoulder while
this is happening.
As it relaxes you can go up and down. You can go forward and
backward.
And then you can just lift up the scapula and
pushing it upward and then
slide the fingers
on the other side, underneath.
And you can pick it up more. Now here's where it becomes a little bit tricky
to hold that scapula while you drop it
but there is a very nice
way of getting under deeper.
And not everybody will have this kind of lift to their shoulder.
Some people wing up really easily.
Some people particularly who
bodybuild and
build up their shoulder muscles are much tighter
to lift so you might not get the winging
but you will still be able to feel the muscle and get under. Usually you can only get under the ridge of the muscle
excuse me,
along the ridge of the bone when it's really built up with muscle
instead of actually going underneath the scapula, where you are actually down inside
to the subscapularis and I like to turn my fingers up and kind of feel the edge there of the
subscapularis.
There's another way you can get to that too.
Here is the scapula...
is to go under this way.
Now you wanna be careful.
You are kind of in the armpit there
but you are lifting up under and again you are not poking. You wanna be
careful. Use the broad part of your thumb.
you don't wanna poke. You wanna give it a big surface area and lift with it.
Like you're pinching onto something.
And you can get to the subscapularis muscle
in that direction.
And that feels really nice.
That's an area that is oftentimes missed alongside here
and probably because a lot of times there is ticklishness that goes on here. Now here
I'm pulling.
This is part of the trapezius muscle
pulling outward
and
getting under it
and of course there is skin and
a little layer of fat, body fat which we all have.
That also is coming along with
that muscle.
Okay and it's also nice to go across this direction
because that's the direction the rhomboids run.
You don't really palpate those. Thye are deeper but
energetically and intentionally they can be
accessed.
As you learn more about how to move energy in the body, which
is something that's going to be taught in my
teaching series.
The more energy you push into somebody the more
response you're going to get from the body.
So that's that.
The other side and
let's do the same thing on the other shoulder.
Just start by bringing her arm up
and we're gonna go underneath here and again, shaking it a little.
On this side I'm doing it a little bit
differently because I'm shaking as I'm moving my hand
along the shoulder.
As your hands develop, particularly with people who are out there going into this
field,
as your hands develop you will be able to do a lot more all at once, but I'm going to
encourage you to do simple things and
and be thorough with it rather than
move into more advanced
work with both hands
where you're connecting the two things until you get a good feel for the body
because once you get a feel for the body you're going to be able to
maneuver yourself better
with much more hand
control and understanding about what's connected to what
and also how to find what's connected and also finding
where the hang ups are,
where the restrictions are.
You can
begin to feel that through the fascal structure.
Some of it is energetic but it's very obvious when you know what you're
looking for.
So we are gonna bring
this underneath again
and I'm gonna pinch this up underneath
and there's the scapula.
Get way under there
and I'm just rotating. You can see
there's a lot you can just
play with. You just want to be really careful
and pay attention to anything that's there.
If you're moving the body in direction that's good it's going to feel easy.
Oftentimes if it's gonna hurt somebody they'll tense up a little bit so you'll have a clue
but all of that you have to really connect in.
It's about connection.
It will be much more
valuable with your work if you can connect into that body and
really get an understanding.
And everybody's different. All their injuries are different. All their stress patterns are
different.
So it's not one size fits all. You have to
be adaptable
and yet there's still
very much of a similarity to everything that you're gonna be doing.
And up into the neck.
And then across the
rhomboid area.
Okay so that's the upper back and then if you wanna move into the lower back
from that...
I had a question about scoliosis.
There's a lot of us that have minor scoliosis.
Some scoliosis is caused from
braces on the teeth.
That has to be explained
because it doesn't make sense, but it has to do with the dural tube
and the cruciate suture
and the flexion extension of that cruciate suture
and class some scoliosis that people are born with is a more serious type.
The scoliosis from braces has an easier chance of being
more corrected than some of the scoliosis that
is from birth where there's a lot of twisting
and weakness, although
cranial sacral will still
helped with some of the discomfort of all of that.
Now I'm just going along the hip
ridge
to feel what's going on. There is a lot of times
this area of the body
is a stable area.
There's a lot of connections because there's attachments from the
upper body and the
lower body and we can also bend in half here.
So these muscles oftentimes get stranied and when you feel those strained muscles it
feels
like you're rubbing across little
those little packing bubbles
or it feels washboard-ish
and that's the stuff you wanna work out.
I work it out by working the muscle in a couple different directions:
upward
which is more with the muscle,
and then across the fiber
and after doing that a couple of times I notice that these little bubbles
tend to disappear.
They get worked out, the little knots.
And of course the spines is always a really important area to
relax.
I think it's important to get close into the vertebrae where the attachments are
possibly stimulating even a little bit of the nerve root,
indirectly anyway.
And this is a little vibratory thing.
When you're working on the shoulders and the back, going back up to the
shoulders
sometimes there is problems down into the elbow
and
you can take the work down into the elbow and find out what's going on.
There is a lot
of things that do go on with the elbow,
which is oftentimes a little torquing of the bone
inflamation that might go along with it.
Lymphatic drainage works well when there's that kind of situation to make
sure that there's not a gelatinous lymph around the
joint capsule
and then oftentimes you can see
how the elbow is aligned with the body
by just feeling it and then
moving the shoulder around a little bit and you can sometimes get a little guide on
how that's working.
It's normally better to do this face up so their elbow is up but
it can also be done this way.
It's just like stearing it but you're following the anatomy you're not
directing it, you're following it.
So if there is problems there and up into the tricep area is another
good place to
work when there is
elbow problems as well as the bicep on the other side.
The other area that might bring in some problems is through this deltoid muscle here.
It's important to get this muscle that we stretch back.
And we can take a stretch. You wanna be real careful when you are stretching someojne back in this
direction because
we really don't
do this very often with the
movement, but here's
a nice stretch there.
That's a very good stretch.
And I'll do that one also on the other side.
Now what I'm doing is lifting the arm and lifting the shoulder.
I'll let her arm drop back down here.
And then we'll do that.
Now look and see how much the scapula wings.
This is a nice good stretch.
If someone has spent a lot of time hovering over a
computer or doing artwork or
doing forward bending type things,
forward leaning things
these backward positions of the arm are going to be
quite possibly very tight
but it is important to keep that stretching
behind us
because it does another thing.
When we stretch the arms back it will open the rib cage and
the shoulders won't tend to roll forward quite so much when we bring it back like that.
So there's just a few more hints for you all out there
for your friends, your family
or even
taking it into your practice
and trying a few other things that you might not have thought of before.
Okay thank you!
This is Athena Jezik.