Thoracic Spine Rotation

So, what are the best ways to improve Thoracic Spine Rotation?  There are a variety of ways.  If you have the manual skills, there are manual mobilizations.  If you have access to a good Chiropractor, they can make some dramatic improvements with some good manipulations.

At MTS, we prefer to combine therapeutic techniques to take advantage of everything we have at our disposal.  But, as a general rule, we choose to empower our athletes to make corrections on their own through self mobilizations.  This allows for them to perform home exercises to make smaller, more frequent improvements.  It also allows for less hands on work for he clinician and better use of their time.

For the most part, T-Spine Rotation Self Mobilization is an active technique.  This is a great way to do it, because it combines retraining of the nervous system along with an actual mobilization of the spine.  Of course, if you have some bigger athletes who struggle fully active self mobilize, you can usually use a little bit of manual over pressure at the end of the movement pattern to help them out.

Active Mobilizations are typically our self mobilization of choice.  As we have discussed, this is because not only are you mobilizing the spine, but you are retraining the nervous system.  This trains the body to use the new range of motion that it recently gained through the mobilization.  When it is done in this way, the mobility gains will be maintained much better and longer between treatments.  Below is just one example of an active mobilization technique.

BretzelThis exercise was the result of the brilliant minds of Gray Cook and Brett Jones.  They deemed it the “Bretzel” because Gray first introduced it on one of his videos using Brett as the model.  Brett loved it so much (not really) that the name stuck.The athlete begins sidelying.  Bring their top leg up and over and the hip should be flexed so that the knee is above the waist level.  The bottom hand should rest on that knee, keeping it in contact with the ground.  The bottom hip should be at neutral and the knee should be flexed so that the top hand can grasp the ankle behind the athlete.  Relax the head back against the floor.Take in a deep breath.  As the athlete exhales, actively push the shoulder down towards the floor as far as possible.