Yoga Shoulder Stress Stretches

Video Transcript

"In this clip I'm actually going to show you some exercises that you can do right at your desk, in order to help with your misalignment and your body posture. We're going to actually talk about shoulders here. With shoulders when you're sitting in a chair, you can do this all just sitting in a chair, you want to just roll your shoulders up and back and down a few times. There is no wrong way or right way to do it, you can do it forwards, you can do it backwards. Basically, what we want it to do, is just loosen up your muscles in your shoulders, because if you're sitting in a chair you're doing a lot of this movement probably, so you want to be able to really roll your shoulders up and back, and get a sense of opening up through your front body so that you're not so hunched over, and being able to open everything up. Another movement that you want to do, is you can actually bring your arms out to the side with your palms down, bringing one arm over the top and just one elbow over the top, and reaching through your fingers to your shoulder blades. When your arms are like this, what you're actually trying to do is lock your fingers over, across through your shoulder blades, lifting your arms up towards the ceiling. Here I'm actually just going to be silent for a second and take some deep breaths and what is actually going to work here is actually with your breath. Yoga is very connected with your breath, and that's actually how you are able to get stretches in through your body and your muscles to expand. Here you want to take a deep breath in, and exhale. Let your shoulders release and see if you can walk your hands a little bit further towards each other. Another inhale in, exhaling. And then just notice here your shoulders should be going down, your shoulder blades should be coming apart. Just try to keep your shoulders away from your ear. This is a typical movement that we see here, a habit we see in yoga. You really want to bring your shoulders back and down, and your elbows are up. So even though your shoulders are down, your elbows are coming up, and that's actually where you get the stretch."