84
may/june 2018yogajournal.com.auProtect your
shoulders in
inversions
Start to understand,
lengthen, and strengthen
your teres major—
a little-known muscle that
can make or break healthy
shoulders when you go
upside down.
By Tom Myersyour practice
ANATOMYIN EVERY INVERSION, from Adho Mukha
Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog
Pose) to Salamba Sirsasana (Supported
Headstand), you are basically asking
your arms and shoulders to act like legs.
But there’s a difference: your legs
are well-designed for pushing, resisting
gravity, and constantly bearing the
weight of your body as it navigates
through all types of terrain. Your
shoulders, in contrast, are built for
pulling and hanging. All the objects that
are dear to us—tools, food, loved
ones—are held by our hands and carried
by our hearts through our shoulders.
When you invert in asana class, you
turn that relationship upside down. And
doing so safely requires both precision
and adaptability. When you ask your
very mobile shoulder assemblies to
accept the compression of your body’s
weight and act like stable legs, then your
bone placement, ligament resilience,
and muscle balance all play a role in
successful, injury-free inversions.
Key to muscle balance in the
shoulders is the teres major. (When we
refer to any particular muscle, we mean
all of its fascial connections and
mechanical influences in its area of the
body.) So let’s explore the teres major’s
entire “post code.”
To find teres major, reach across and
grab the flesh that forms the back of
your armpit, with your thumb in your
armpit and your fingertips on the
outside edge of your shoulder blade.
If you slide your thumb back
and forth, you can feel the dense and
slippery tendon of your latissimus dorsi
(or lat) muscle. You can follow it as itcurves up around into the humerus
(upper arm bone). The lat comes from
your lower back, connecting into the
fascia of your thoracic and lumbar spine,
hip, and even your outer ribs, and
eventually winding into a flat, wide
tendon that attaches to your upper arm.
Under your fingertips is your lat’s
good friend, and our focus: teres major
(meaning “big round” in Latin)—a
much shorter, square muscle that runs
from the bottom corner of your shoulder
blade and joins into the humerus right
beside, and parallel to, the lat.
What you are holding when you hold
the back of your armpit is the control
panel for the proper positioning of your
shoulder in inversions. The lats and teres
major form part of the big X across your
back that I call the Back Functional Line.
This myofascial (muscular plus fascial)
line connects from the end of the lat on
your arm, all the way across your back,
to your opposite hip and leg.
While your lats are broad surface
muscles that usually lengthen and
strengthen pretty quickly with initial
yoga practice, teres major is, by contrast,
not very well known or understood in
the context of movement. The myofascial
pathway through teres major requires
more attention to get balanced. I call this
pathway the Deep Back Arm Line—
another myofascial line of connection
that starts with the little- finger side of
your hand and ends at your thoracic
spine.
The idea is to get even muscular and
fascial tone through the whole Deep
Back Arm Line. You can do it; it just
requires attention. ILLUSTRATION: MICHELE GRAHAM; PHOTO: RICK CUMMINGS