Shoulder Stretches
Working the shoulders and stretching the muscles of the shoulder groups often gets overlooked in a daily workout routine. Flexibility is an important part of health that does not take a lot of time to maintain. In fact, a stretching routine should take up no more than four to six minutes of your workout time. Stretching the muscles of the shoulders keeps the range of flexibility in these joints high and does not take a lot of effort. To stretch the shoulders, we should worry about the posterior and anterior muscles. Fortunately, it is easy to stretch the muscles in the shoulder group
The first stretch works the anterior muscles of the shoulder – that is the front. To perform an effective anterior should stretch hold one arm out in front of you and bring it as close as possible as you can to the opposite shoulder. Do not bend the arm or the elbow. Using the opposite arm grab the thigh and bring the arm as close as you can to the shoulder. You only need to feel strain on the muscle. Hold the arm this way for several seconds and then switch arms and repeat the procedure.
Stretching the front shoulder muscles this way is a good start, but we must also work the back shoulder muscles. Fortunately, this is a little more difficult and you may want to grab a towel. (Fortunately, if you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series you know how useful an item an ordinary bath towel can be.)
Grab the towel with one hand and throw it behind your back. As tempting as it may be to just leave it like this, this is not the purpose of this stretch. Using the opposite hand grab the other end of the towel. Once you have the towel firmly in the grasp of both hands try to bring it up as far as you can. The goal is to try to touch the neck with the lower hand, but actually doing so is not necessary. When you feel tension in this muscle group hold it there. You've now performed the first posterior shoulder stretch. To work wit the muscle on the other side of the body, repeat the procedure but reverse the position of the hand grips.
Once the shoulders are stretched properly and the muscles of the area have been loosened, you can move onto the next area of your workout. But now that you've stretched just a little, don't you feel better about the task at hand? Once your entire stretching routine has been performed, you can go on to the fun (or maybe not so fun) portions of your routine – the activity that you've chosen for your workout. Fortunately, doing the shoulder stretches will at least keep the muscles in the group from getting sore or resulting in injury. As long as you remembered the other muscles in addition to your shoulder stretches, they're should be no problems, but it's not like you would forget, would you?
