// Thoracic Spine

While we commonly feel excess tension around the lumbar and cervical spine, a knotty t-spine is often overlooked, despite it feeding tightness downstream and upstream to these common trouble spots. If your thoracic spine gets and stays too tight, you’re going to struggle to rotate your torso, might become compromised in flexion and extension, and may even encourage dysfunctional breathing patterns. Here’s an exercise that can help restore full ROM:

// Abdomen

Because the gut area is involved in bracing during compound lifts like the deadlift, squat, and kettlebell swing, is responsible for generating torque during twisting – see throwing a baseball or football, any kind of paddling, or slinging a med ball in the gym – and, as previously mention, acts as a conduit for power exchange between the big engines of the hips and shoulders, it can get mighty tight. Fortunately, there are a couple of simple ways to unglue these gnarly old tissues:

// Shoulders, Pecs and Lats

Just as with the lumbar spine, which we’ll address in a moment, the shoulder complex is, well, complex. We can’t just consider the ball and socket joint itself, but must also consider the big muscle groups surrounding it that can bring a lot of force to bear. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll focus on the lats and pecs. These are both involved in overhead and horizontal pushing and pulling motions (see: an awful lot of what you do in the weight room), and are powerhouses that when left to their own devices, become extremely gristly and can compromise shoulder function. So let’s do something about that with these simple yet highly effective exercises:

// Lumbar Spine/Glutes/Hips/High Hamstrings

No article of this type would be complete without considering the pesky lower back. Pretty much every athlete has either dealt with back pain, is struggling with it right now, or will face it in the future. Reasons include athletic ones such as poor positioning, structural factors such as asymmetry and imbalances, and lifestyle-related issues like too much sitting. Fortunately, there are some simple mobility exercises that can set things right, both in the pesky area itself and also the tissues upstream and downstream that can feed tension into it (and yes, I do know that the glutes, hips, and hamstrings are technically below the trunk, but as I said, they can dramatically affect it so we’re going there).