For you guys and gals that came to class yesterday, you were able to finally meet (or re-meet) Nancy. Besides running “the hill” 5 times for the 400 m run, a total of 75 overhead squats were completed. That’s a lot of overhead squats, especially for you newbies who are foreign to the movement. An enormous amount of flexility, core stability, and strength go into these. If there are insufficiencies in any of these three, it will open up room for error. Lowering the weight, widening the stance and getting a wider grip on the bar will help but sometimes aren’t enough. It is more common than you would think, that when doing the overhead squat, for one’s arm to experience some numbness. This is usually due to some sort of peripheral nerve entrapment or just simply a pinched nerve. There are ways around this and as you progress in flexibility and strength, chances of this happening are less frequent. Here are a few things that will help in the future:
1. Posterior capsule stretch, sleeper stretch, external rotation stretch
2. Lats stretch, pec stretch, pec minor massage. You can use basketball or other ball andto lie on top of for pec rolling.
For pec major you can use corner stretch — arms abducted to 90, with hands pointing up. Face the concave corner of a wall, and let the elbows touch the side of the wall. Then, lunge forward and let it stretch out the anterior muscles of the shoulder.
3. Deep tissue massage all around the scapula; anterior, lateral and posterior shoulder; coracobrachialis, biceps brachii, and brachialis.
4. Nerve glides (google first link)
5. Band dislocates and wall slides
6. Foam roll thoracic spine (put 45s on your chest for deeper stretch). Also, roll side to side as you are rolling and try to arch your back
K-Star Says it best:
Watch this entire vid.
This one gets good at around 3:15.
Fast forward to about 3:25.