Learning: Upper Back Muscles

Note: this is a quick post I made in my Everfit community forum for my participating clients!

I feel this is very relevant to most of my clients so I hope you find this helpful and interesting! Something that I've noticed over my years of training myself and others is how hard it is to connect to areas of our bodies that are not easily SEEN - pretty much anything on our back side! But I have found for me that it helps to visualize and really understand what's happening BACK there in order to better engage and work these muscles during your training.

Today specifically I want to focus on a very common weak point for almost everyone in strength training- the rhomboids and the lower trapezius muscles. To understand what a muscle does, look at the direction of the muscle fibers. You can see that in the picture showing the rhomboids (the skeleton with muscles between the scapula), the muscle fibers are pulling slightly diagonally toward the midline of the body and down toward the scapula. So this muscle is one of the muscles responsible for squeezing the scapula back toward each other (called retraction of the shoulder blades/scapula) - and is very important in exercises like seated rows, etc.

The Rhomboid Muscles

Then we have the trapezius muscle (black and white photo with traps in red) and you can look and see that the muscle fibers change direction depending on what part of the traps you are looking at. Your upper and middle traps are angled up toward the neck and outward away from the body. They help pull your shoulders up toward your neck and toward the midline. However, the lower fibers are almost completely reversed, they orient down toward the midline and outward, helping to stabilize the shoulders downward and toward each other.

The Trapezius Muscle

If I (or a trainer) has ever poked your mid back to bring your awareness here, you have an idea of what we are drawing your attention to now. When doing certain movements of our back - we want to ensure we are training these muscles to their fullest, by fulling squeezing the scapula together we ensure we are hitting both of these muscle groups. However, certain movements require extra concentration to ensure the lower traps are also firing, and we are not overtraining only the upper fibers which are much stronger and easier to feel for most people.

Let me know if this makes sense and if you like posts like this!