Strong, Healthy Shoulders Part 1: The A-Frame
Strong, Healthy Shoulders
The A-Frame is a foundational stretch and strengthening exercise, and a great way to begin building some usable shoulder stability and leg flexibility.
Once you have built up some foundational strength, you can progress steadily to more challenging shoulder strength exercises and continue building usable strength and stability for injury prevention, rehab and every day shoulder health. We will demonstrate those in a future post!
To get into the A-Frame position:
Start on the floor, on all fours, making sure that you hands are shoulder-width apart. Your shoulders should also be directly over your wrists, and your hips directly over your knees.
Your fingers should be spread with your pointer fingers facing forward. Grip the floor and rotate your elbow pit forward to assist your shoulders to externally rotate. This will allow you to be properly aligned for an overhead position such as the A-Frame.
Keeping your head in a neutral position, tuck your toes under and lift your hips up towards the sky by straightening your legs.
Push up through the shoulders so that they are as close to your ears as possible.
You are now in the A-Frame!
Depending on your mobility, your heels may not be touching the ground, and that’s ok! Given that we sit so much, it isn’t uncommon.
Here’s some tips to increase your mobility and build foundational shoulder strength and stability at the same time. You’d want to do these in order until your mobility increases to allow you to progress to the next step.
Progression 1
Keep your knees as straight as possible. If you have tight hamstrings, you’ll find this hard at the beginning, but persevere! You can get deeper into the stretch by tensing your quads, which allows your hamstrings to relax a little more.
Progression 2
Try to push your heels down into the ground so that your foot is flat. It can take some time to eventually have both feet flat on the ground, so take your time and be consistent.
Progression 3
Now that you can do the previous two progressions, you have adequate flexibility in the lower body to be able to start incorporating the upper body.
You can do this by trying to push your shoulders up as tall as you can, aiming to touch your shoulders to your ears. Once you have this position locked in, you can then begin to pull your chest down towards the ground, which starts to give a nice stretch through your thoracic spine.
As with any stretch, take some time to be mindful.
Scanning the body and taking deep breaths will be beneficial.
At the Handstand Hub, we teach shoulder elevation (gluing your ears to your shoulders and pushing up as tall as you can) rather than shoulder depression (letting the shoulders sink away from your ears) for overhead movements.
This is because we want to strengthen and stabilise the shoulders, so that it transfers to strength-based overhead positions (such as the handstand). When upside-down, we need strength in shoulder elevation, otherwise our arm ends up collapsing into the shoulder joint, which can cause issues down the line.
In case you aren’t already sold on why you should be practicing the A-Frame. Here’s some more benefits:
Improves posture
Relieves and improves shoulder and back pain
Improve your mobility
Click the button below to read the next article, A-Frame Progressions
