If you get Shoulder pain or discomfort when you're lifting weights you might be dealing

with a tight Posterior capsule.

Today I'm going to show you, first of all what the Posterior Capsule is,

secondly a way for you to test on your very own self without needing anybody to determine

whether or not yours is tight and

thirdly if it is, I'm going to give you a stretch that you can do to help fix that.

Now as far as the Posterior Capsule, it is a capsule structure that will contribute and

tighten over time to lead to this forward or rounded Shoulder posture.

The way it does that is usually because of what's going on with the muscles behind your

Shoulder.

So we know the Rotator Cuff muscles here, the Supraspinatus, the Infraspinatus and teres

minor, they all come around here,

they wrap around and attach to the side of your upper arm here and they control it's

movement.

Now we know that, the rotation of it, we know that if these muscles get tight they kind

of will do this,

they'll sort of stay down, tight and together, taper down and almost push this forward.

Well over time that leads to this kind of chronic tightening and shortening of that

Posterior Capsule,

it's a little bit deeper right inside here, that again holds the upper arm in place.

That's a bad story though, that's a bad situation.

Because as I said, any time you're in this position and you go to start lifting weights

up over head or even Bench Pressing,

you're causing a greater opportunity to start pinching some structures in here.

Because you just don't have the room anymore to lift your arm up.

Again, I've asked you to do this a lot of times, try to roll your arm in and then lift

your arm as high as you can. you'll actually get a block.

So I want to show you now how to determine whether or not your Posterior Capsule is even

tight in the first place,

which a lot of you will find that it is, and then we can figure out a way to fix that.

Ok, so to figure out whether your Posterior Capsule is tight, you're going to want to

do this stretch.

Get on the ground here and you want to Internally Rotate your arm as far as you can.

Right, not just turn your wrist here or pronate your forearm but literally Internally Rotate

your arm as far as you can.

Now put it up here at 90 degrees, take your other hand and hold your Lat in place.

In other words try to keep your Shoulder Blade flat to the ground, ok, because you'll see

why in one second.

As I push down and I have my arm internally rotated as far as I can, now I'm just going

to try to reach across my body as much as I can.

And I'll see that, can I get this outside portion of my elbow to cross my chest, the

midline of my chest.

So if I'm looking right here, this is my target.

Again I keep my hand in here in place, all the way internally rotated and I'm trying

to move across.

Now for me, I can automatically feel a lot of tightness right through the back portion

here of my shoulder, right here the back of my shoulder.

So what I want to do is again, try to do that.

You see if I allowed my Scapula to come up off the ground here, then I could go way over.

That's not testing your Posterior Capsule guys, because we know that the your Shoulder

Blade is attached to your Shoulder,

so we want to make sure that we don't just let that happen.

We're looking for the isolated flexibility of the Posterior Capsule.

So if you could do this and you can't get it across the midline of your body, then you're

going to want to try to do the stretch I'm going to show you now.

If you can, you don't necessarily have to do this.

What you might want to check is the tightness of your Lats.

Because we know that the Lats are going to affect how high and how freely you can raise

your arm up over your head.

So you might want to check Lat tightness.

I often find that Lats are really commonly tight and it may not be necessarily your Posterior

Capsule.

So check that out if that's something that you're dealing with.

But for the rest of you, let's go on to the third part of this and I'm actually going

to show you the stretch.

Ok so the name of the stretch is called the Sleeper Stretch.

It's actually pretty easy to perform on yourself.

There's a few things you want to do to get yourself set up right.

First you want to get 90 degree bend here at your elbow.

Then you want to get your arm below 90 degrees, just a little bit, about 70 degrees abducted

so away from your side.

This will be 90 degrees away from my side, I'm going to go about 70 degrees.

Now really important, you want to lay here, you can put something under your head to support

your head here, I just didn't bring something with me at the moment.

But what you want to do is allow your body to pull your Shoulder Blade back, ok, so intra

retraction, I'll show you in a second here.

This is what it looks like here as you can see my back now doing that.

So I can actually pin the side of my Shoulder Blade, the outside border of my Shoulder Blade

down into the floor.

For the same reason, like I said in testing the stretch, you don't want to have that become

part of the equation here.

If you're going to isolate the Posterior Capsule, you want to make sure you're not allowing

the Shoulder Blade to move.

So the Shoulder Blade stays pinned here into the floor, then we take our hand, the opposite

hand, we actually hold underneath our elbow here,

to make sure it stays in position. Get them leaned into the floor here so that my Shoulder

Blade can't move,

and now all I do is I push down here through my elbow.

So I'm causing internal rotation here of my left Shoulder.

Now I don't crank on it really hard, I don't try to lift myself up because again now we're

allowing the Shoulder Blade to move.

I literally just kind of let my elbow gently push down into my forearm and I can feel that

again, right in here through the back of my Posterior Capsule.

Ok, now what we want to do is ultimately see if we can get to the point where we can touch

the floor.

Because you should have about 70 degrees of internal rotation.

But I'm far from it, I mean I can reach my fingers down as far as I can, I can't get

it there.

But it just means, I have to work on my Shoulder Capsule flexibility a little bit and mobility.

Ok, so that's all you do. You try to hold onto this stretch for about 30 seconds maybe

3 times, do it a few times a week,

and you'll gradually start to see that your internal rotation will improve via the capsular

mobility being improved,

not just stretching out the Rotator Cuff but actually working on the adaptations that have

been caused by the fact that your Rotator Cuff has been too tight all along.

Guys remember, when you're trying to train like an Athlete here, you've got to cover

all the issues.

It's not just about flexibility, it could be your mobility.

It's not just about your mobility, it could be about your strength.

It could be about tightness in areas that you're not even considering.

So you want to make sure you have all your bases covered.

I try to help you guys do that here on this channel.

And of course, I try to walk you through it all in our ATHLEANX Training Program.

If you haven't already joined Team ATHLEAN, and you want to get a step by step program

to start training like an Athlete,

then head to ATHLEANX.COM right now and get our ATHLEANX Training System.

If you found this helpful make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below and whatever

else you want to see guys let me know

I will be sure and happy to help you in our upcoming videos.

Alright, I'll see you guys again soon.

Bye!