Why not understanding your shoulders causes back, neck and shoulder pain

Imagine being strapped too tightly into a full climbing harness. The harness is attached around your hips, around your legs and around your shoulders. It’s very uncomfortable because it’s pulling your shoulders back and down, jamming your body into your hips.

That’s exactly what you do with your shoulder muscles.

You have a whole panoply of different shoulder muscles. They pull your shoulders in every direction imaginable. These muscles can twist your shoulders every which way.

Because most of your shoulder muscles lie in your back, they get mistaken for back muscles and used to pull your back and neck around. They end up being used in your attempt to hold yourself tall and straight.

Which muscles am I talking about?

Latissimus Dorsi

The most important of these muscles is the widest muscle in your back: “Musculus Latissimus Dorsi” in the anatomy books. One on the left and one on the right, each latissimus dorsi muscle acts like a climbing harness strap. Together, these two muscles link your shoulder blades down to the large flat bone at the back of your hips.

From the shoulder blade, each latissimus dorsi muscle continues up, passing through your arm-pit, to attach to your upper arm.

Other strong muscles move and hold your shoulder blades in various other ways. Your shoulder blades are linked together across your back, attached up to your head and neck, and anchored down to your lower back.

Yet more muscles attach the shoulder blades forward to your rib-cage. These last muscles act like the strap across your chest on the climbing harness.

A natural climbing harness

Taken together, all these muscles form a natural climbing harness.

Apes and monkeys use that climbing harness to swing through the trees by their hands. All that swinging keeps those shoulder muscles stretched and limber. No monkey would ever mistake its shoulder muscles for back muscles.

We humans are different in that we tend not to swing from trees very much. As a result we tend to forget what those muscle are for. We forget that they are shoulder muscles. We forget that their main purpose is to enable us to swing ourselves around by our arms.

Misusing our natural climbing harness

Mistaking our natural climbing harness for back muscles, we begin to use it to pull ourselves up straight.

“Neck back, shoulders straight!” It’s not just soldiers on parade who are told to do that. We all get the same demands from concerned parents, from teachers, even from friends and colleagues.

It may be a bit more subtle, but we get essentially the same input from fitness instructors, doctors and physiotherapists. Culturally brain-washed as we are, our professionals share and propagate the myth that our shoulder muscles are back muscles and that their purpose is to hold us erect.

Now we recognise our climbing harness for what it is, we can begin to slacken the straps. Relieved of the pain caused by a too-tight muscular climbing harness, we can begin to look in more appropriate places for the secret to standing tall and straight.