Welcome to Fit Body Happy Joint. My name is Shannon. Today we have our one question Monday where Dr. Payton and I just discuss a commonly asked question as quick and concisely as possible. Dr.

Payton is a physical therapist and she's a teacher at Evelo and she also works for Evelo.

So welcome, Payton. I'm excited for this topic. I know we too this will be a

great one. So we are talking about neck shoulder tension and specifically upper trap tension and your upper trap is the big muscle that connects from basically your neck down to your shoulder region and this is commonly an area where people feel a lot of tension.

It's commonly an area where people want to stretch,

where people want to get massages.

You know, I think I hear from when I was a physical therapist almost all of my patients.

Oh, I hold my tension right here and it would point to their upper traps.

So I actually have a background of experiencing a lot of tension in my upper traps to the point where it was like constantly nagging like it's constantly annoying and like it just felt tight and I was constantly stretching and constantly getting massages and I will say that the stretching and massages never did anything it like temporarily relieved but

Never moved the needle it would always come back.

So maybe if you're listening and you're also experiencing that,

you notice the same thing.

It's like stretching and massage, like feels good temporarily,

but that's just what it is.

It's just a bandage, just a temporary fix. So today we want to talk about the upper

traps a little bit more because I no longer have any issues

with my upper traps. I don't even think about it anymore.

They don't bother me anymore.

So we want to kind of give you some tools in today's podcast. So let's start by talking about something that is I think misunderstood, especially in the fitness industry, and it's that we don't cue for

posturing a lot of shoulders down and back. I think like, you know, historically like that's you if you need to have your shoulders away from your ears like

start your shoulders down and back puff your chest up but that posturing could actually be doing you more harm than good.

Payton, do you want to take that and talk about the posturing of shoulders down and back?

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