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1) What Crossfit is:

I field emails every day with questions about crossfit injuries.  The biggest complaint I hear from these individuals about other physical therapists is that they don’t understand crossfit.  Obviously, understanding what you’re trying to send your patients back to and what they’ll have to be capable of performing is going to be critically important in the rehab process.

To add to that, the amount of misinformation and bias out there in regards to crossfit is staggering.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been wearing a crossfit shirt and I’ll hear negative remarks about crossfit from other therapists who have never even set a foot in a crossfit gym or have any idea of what crossfit even is.  

I was at CSM (Combined sections meeting, a very large physical therapy conference) and one of the presenters named Joe Black made a very interesting statement.  He sends his patients to crossfit after therapy to address some of the problems he found in therapy.  He believes that crossfit can be helpful in the rehab process (With a well designed program I completely agree).  This was a very refreshing statement.  Many therapists hold the completely opposite opinion.  In fact there was a whole presentation at CSM that year talking about the dangers of high intensity programs like crossfit.

After Joe’s statement you wouldn’t believe the gasps from the audience.  They sounded disgusted.  You would have thought that Joe just took off his shirt and looked just like Edward Norton from American History X.

Obviously there is a lot of negative belief about crossfit in the therapy world.  Crossfit is certainly not a perfect system and I don’t mean to raise it up on a pedestal but crossfit is certainly not the demon it is made out …read more

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Well it looks like your front rack position could use some work huh?  Me too.  Let’s get down to business.  Last week we spoke about how important hammering down thoracic spine mobility and stability is to get into a proper front rack position.  If you missed it, you can find the article HERE.  Next on the list, we’ll talk scapulas.

So as you guys may have heard, the thoracic spine attaches to the ribcage which connects to the scapula (say what?  Click HERE for an explanation).   Because of this, we need to clear up any issues with the thoracic spine before we start worrying about the shoulder blades.  Getting into the correct position with your shoulder blades is going to rely on having adequate alignment in the thoracic spine first.  Good position of the thoracic spine will automatically clear up a lot of the other issues down the chain in our body.  So what’s next?

2) Scapular stability and motor control:

If the thoracic spine is all cleared up, the scapula will be free to do its job.  (Find out more about how this occurs HERE)  So what are we trying to accomplish with our shoulder blades?

If we’re talking about front squats and cleans we want to position the shoulder blades in the most optimal position to keep our elbows up high and support the weight on our shoulders.   A few things to keep in mind here:

• The position of the scapula directly affects the amount of external rotation we’ll need at the shoulder to get into an efficient position.  If we have a better position of the scapula (slight retraction/neutral position of the scapula) we won’t need as much external rotation at the shoulder to get into a strong position (1).  In other words, if your shoulders are …read more