How To Foam Roll Your Upper Back

One of The Best Posture and Shoulder Exercises

Thanks for stopping by! We hope it’s helpful. For those that need more guidance, we’ve created a step by step online program to finally cure your shoulder pain!

Here is exactly how to foam roll your upper back! The thoracic spine (known as your “upper back”) is one of the most forgotten about parts of the body! We spend so much time on our devices or sitting slouched in chairs that we are LITERALLY folded forwards for most of the day. To regain proper form in your back, we need to move it into extension. It’s time to learn exactly how to perform an upper back foam roll exercise.

Exercise

Grab a foam roller and place it perpendicular to your spine – roughly at the base of your shoulder blades. Now extend your head and shoulders back over the arch until you feel a comfortable stretch, and then return to neutral.

Time

Hang out in one spot for as long as you feel a stretch. As you feel it fade, shift the roll down your spine. Spend a total of 5 minutes per day in this position. Look at you go, you’re foam rolling your upper back!

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Video Transcript

Some people prefer to read and we’ve got you covered!

All right, it’s time for our foam roll exercise for the upper back. For this one, what I want us to focus on is trying to extend, or do the opposite movement of our upper back as opposed to where a lot of us are all the time. That can limit your shoulder range, and stop you from getting that full expansion of the shoulder, and closing down that space we talked about earlier.

So to do that, what we’re going to do, is grab onto our roller, start it at around the bottom of the shoulder blades. What that means for males is around nipple height, and for females around where the bra strap comes around. From here what you’re gonna do is interlace your fingers, and put them behind the neck, and relax the head into your hands. Elbows come in tight, which is gonna get your shoulder blades out of the way. And from here what you can do is bring your elbows towards the sky. So you come down, bring the elbows towards the sky, feel that stretch happening, and back down.

The big thing I want you to focus on here is that you are not unlocking your lower back. So what a lot of people do incorrectly with this, is they will let their lower back loose and extend. They come down lower back loose, and come down. And they feel like they have so much flexibility, but really they are using their lower back, and not their upper core. So from here, stabilize yourself, your lower back, go ’till you feel the stretch, and come back down.

Once you feel that stretch start to fade after about two to three repetitions, you’re then going to move down to the next level of your back, a little bit higher, and you’re gonna do that again. Come back down, repeat until you feel that stretch start to go. Again, I’m not overextending, and then go to the next point. And here up, and back. You’re gonna move from the bottom of your shoulder blades, all the way to the top as you repeat. And that’s it. We’ll see you in the next video.

Hey guys, thanks a lot for watching all the way to the end, it means a lot. We’ve actually created some online programs just for you guys tackling different conditions of the knee, the shoulder, the elbow, and the foot, and other common issues. You can check them out at PhysioReady.com, and use our promo code Move 10 to get yourself $10 off your first program. Hope it helps, thanks a lot, and we’ll see you in the next video.

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