When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Squeeze Your Shoulder Blades Together
Our shoulder blades can move in different directions. They can slide up and down, towards each other or away from each other, and rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. When you’re doing an exercise that involves your upper back, instructors sometimes reduce the difficulty to “squeezing” or “pulling in” your shoulder blades. And that’s not always what you should be doing.
When you deadlift
Engage your upper back muscles to get a strong set before starting the deadlift. Unfortunately, too many people think that this can be done by bringing the shoulder blades together.
During the deadlift, you just need to stand up with the barbell, keeping the barbell close to your body. You don’t need to bring your shoulder blades together; it won’t help you. One of my favorite ways to remember this is with a demonstration that powerlifting coach Dave Tate has done in several of his videos: he marks with chalk where a person’s arms go when he pulls his shoulder blades back and when he only pulls his shoulder. blades down, not back.
This makes a big difference, as I’ve seen with my own deadlifts. Now I’m thinking about bringing my shoulders down to my hips without pushing them back together at all. By the time I get to the top of the lift, my hands are holding the bar exactly where it should be.
When you do pull ups
The scapular pull-up is a great exercise to use as a complement to pull-ups. You keep your arms straight but engage the muscles in your upper back. But to get the most out of this exercise (or get the beginning of a pull up right), you need to move your shoulder blades correctly.
Once again, it doesn’t squeeze them together. The best cue I know for palm pull-ups is to hang on the bar and imagine that you are trying to push it in front of you with straight arms. As shown in this video , the shoulder blades start in a position where their bottoms point away from each other, almost sideways, and the move you want is to rotate them back towards each other while lowering them. Most of this action comes from your lats, the muscles that run from your underarms down the sides of your back.
When you hold the bar over your head
If you are pressing the bar over your head or trying to stabilize the bar in this position (for example, in the overhead squat, snatch or clean and jerk), use this approach as described in Catalyst Athletics . It’s not as simple as a shrug or a squeeze, but you’ll get the idea pretty quickly if you try. You want to squeeze the tops of your shoulder blades together and then rotate them so that the outer edge (on the side of your body) is turned up. This allows you to comfortably hold your arms above your head while using your back muscles to stabilize your shoulders.
When you squat
Here’s one time you really want to squeeze your shoulder blades together: when you’re getting ready to squat. As this Juggernaut squat setup video shows, bringing your shoulder blades together is part of how you build tension in your upper back and create a secure bar rack. That’s not all, including bringing the elbows to the center of the body, but contraction is one of the first and most important steps.