The Up and Down Of The Shoulder Girdle

How often do you have to remind your students (or yourself) to "Keep your shoulders away from your ears!"  

Why do so many of us carry our shoulders as earrings? And why don't we get any better?

Shoulder Depression Overview

The lowering of the shoulder girdle is called shoulder depression. The muscles responsible for pulling your shoulders away from your ears are your lower trapezius, your serratus anterior, and your pectoralis minor. They are all located below your shoulder. So they PULL your shoulders down.

Above your shoulder are your upper trapezius, your levator scapula and your rhomboids. They cause shoulder elevation and are the antagonists of shoulder depression, so they have to lengthen for your shoulder girdle to sink down and stay down. 

Cueing Shoulder Depression

When cueing shoulder depression make sure you focus your cueing on the muscles responsible for the action. "Pull your shoulders down" is a great cue. I would also add "with your underarm muscles." just to clarify how to achieve that.

Since many people have lots of tension in their neck muscles (which are above our shoulder girdle), we pay much more attention to those and we tend to push our shoulders down. But that's not as effective. 

When using a tactile cue, we place our hands on top of our students' shoulders and press down. This is an assisted stretch for your upper trapezius (the antagonist of shoulder depression) but it doesn't help educate and strengthen your shoulder depressors. It doesn't improve motor control, so our brain doesn't learn to do it. That's why we need those million reminders, and we will continue to need them, unless we teach those underarm muscles how to do their job.

It's more effective to gently touch the underarm area on your student's back and brush downward to help activate those muscles, and make them feel responsible.

Pulling instead of pushing makes shoulder depression much more gentle and effective.

Related: When Cueing "Shoulders Down" is NOT a Good Idea

It's All Connected

Another super helpful (indirect) cue for shoulder depression focuses on your arms. Since your arms are connected to your shoulder, you can cue your arms to affect change in your shoulder alignment.

Here's a video explaining how to cue your arms to improve shoulder alignment.

Here are a few exercises you can try this cue with:

In a seated exercise such as Seated Pull Down on the Cadillac, I recommend you cue "Pull your elbows down.

In Baby Swan on the mat, cue "Reach your elbows to the back of the room."

In prone exercises like Dart, you can cue "Slide your fingers back towards your feet." This'll work like a charm, because your fingers are attached to your forearems, which are attached to your upper arms which are attached to your shoulder blades.

In Pulling Straps on the Reformer, make sure to "Reach your hands waaaaaay back to your feet. Try to touch your toes." 

PS: You'll find lots more examples for shoulder depression cues and exercises inside the Pilates Encyclopedia member library. Learn more...