Hey everybody, this is Dr. Pat from the Springfield Wellness Center. And I wanted to make this video to talk about relieving muscle tension in the middle back and some of the soft tissue work that we do to help make that possible.
So, you know, the middle back ranges from about T 5 or so down to about T 12. So a pretty broad area here that we’re working with, there’s a lot of muscle in this area, we’ve got the erector spinae muscles, which are going from the pelvis all the way up to the back of the head that helped keep the human body upright. We’ve also got muscles like the rhomboids, which are between the shoulder blades, and they help facilitate the movement of the shoulder blades with our movements. And we got just lots of muscles through here to help the ribcage expand and breathe and do everything that it needs to do as well. So there’s a lot of tissue in here. And it’s very common with postural problems, it’s very common with middle back pain itself. With muscle strains, lots of different things that can cause pain through here. And having tight muscles through here makes everything more difficult because what we really want is mobility and stability. And if we don’t have good mobility, it’s going to make everything a little bit more challenging.
Relieving Muscle Tension In The Middle Back With Soft Tissue Work
The purpose of doing soft tissue work such as Active Release, or Graston, or massage therapy, is to help those tissues heal and move easier so that they can work with the rest of the spine. So for today, I just wanted to demonstrate a little bit of soft tissue work that we’ll do here in the office. It only takes a couple minutes when we’re doing it, you know during that time, but I just want to give you an example of what that looks like. So you have an idea going forward here. We’ll start off with some of these erector muscles kind of in the lower part of the middle back, I’m gonna have to cross your arms over your chest. And so I’ll kind of reach right here so I can stabilize, we’ll apply some pressure and some tissue slack here, and then we’ll lean forward like this. So she can feel the stretch through this muscle coming all the way up through here. And we’ll do a few passes of that, to help that muscle loosen up. Very good, you can rest your arms. That’s one example. I’m going to do another example where we’re working with the rhomboid muscles, which involves that shoulder blade movement. So for this one, Dana, I’m gonna have you bring your arm to the side, I’m gonna apply some pressure. And then what I want you to do is cross that arm across your body. Go ahead then and bring it back again. And one more here. Excellent. All right, you can rest that arm there.
Relieving Muscle Tension With Postural Exercises
So that’s a really good one for working on your posture. So when we’re doing postural exercises, we don’t want any adhesions or knots or anything in those muscles, limiting our capabilities for that. So helping to break those things down and get them back to square one. Now you can rebuild that foundation from the ground up when it comes to building your posture. You know better going forward there. So, again, I just wanted to give you some examples of soft tissue work that we do in the office. We also do massage therapy. There’s other times where the doctor will use a metal tool to help break through some of those really stubborn adhesions. It’s all about getting things functioning together with the spine, everything needs to be on the same page and get things moving in the right direction. So hope you found this video useful and we’ll see you on the next one.