Rhomboids: Enter the Magician's Circle

I was scrolling through my make-believe Facebook feed the other day and came across this Yoga Journal blog post, which was posted by Amy Ippoliti on her Facebook page. The post was "liked" by about 3.5K people, which, coupled with the fact that it seemed like it talked anatomy, made me click on it.

The post summarized what the author (Kelle Walsh, the Yoga Journal’s Executive Online Editor) had learned from Ippoliti about the "yoga that helps" when it comes to shoulder tightness, pain or injury.

I will concern myself today with only a couple of the points made in this post because they are simply incorrect:

• "...engaging the rhomboids, slide the scapula (not shoulders) back and down, creating softness here, as the chest fills up bright." The rhomboids retract the shoulder blade superiorly and medially. That is, they elevate the shoulder blade and draw it towards the spine. The rhomboids cannot and will not draw the scapula down the back (that would be what the lower fibers of the trapezius muscles do). Although the rhomboids, along with the traps and the "posterior" portion of the serratus anterior muscles, are the "glue" that holds the shoulder blades on the back when we exert force through the arms (see Keller, 2008), focusing solely on the rhomboids is problematic. The rhomboid activation tends to turn on the levator scapulae and the upper traps, a recipe for tension in the upper back and neck. Further, overusing the rhomboids to create shoulder stability can, over time, flatten the upper back. Keeping with the spirit of the post that everything is connected, it is simplistic to zoom in on the rhomboids without acknowledging their intimate connection with the serratus anterior muscles, for example.
• "Fill up your waistline." If I want to take my arms overhead--as in, for example, upward hands (urdhva hastasana), down dog or handstand--and my shoulders are tight, in order for me to complete the movement that I am aiming for, my spine will respond and arch. The post says: "we often create such extreme extension in the waistline that it compromises movement of the shoulders." In fact, the waistline goes into extension because my tight shoulders have reached their range of motion limit. But since I am determined to take my arms overhead, my spine has no choice but to respond by arching. When the arms are not weight-bearing as in warrior 1, for example, the simplest solution would be to bring the arms into the front plane of the body (i.e., in your line of vision). So, aligning my shoulders to fit my range of motion will fill up my waistline. But "allow[ing] the side waists to fill up" when my shoulders are past an integrated range of motion is, in my opinion, not possible.

Although the "plug your armbones into their sockets" instruction--also mentioned in the post--is not so problematic as the two points above, I feel that plugging your arm bones is effective only to a certain extent. The problem really is not that the arm bones are not plugged into their sockets, but that the arm bone-scapula rhythm (gleno-humeral rhythm) is not balanced. As Trish Corley recently commented on a Matthew Remski WAWADIA blog post, "A stable shoulder comes from strong scapular muscles that work in a timely manner to rotate the scapula in a particular rhythm that coincides with the position of the humerus." When this rhythm is lost, imbalance, pain and injury ensue.

What is even more concerning about this post is that it was written by a Yoga Journal editor, a publication that claims to be a mainstream authority on yoga, and that it was liked by thousands of people on Facebook (the post seems to have been removed though), many of them presumably yoga instructors.

I am currently reading a book by the late Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, which documents the initial years of Stalinist terror in the late 1940s to mid-1950s in Bulgaria and how the cult of personality and party dogma led to an individual and collective abdication from responsibility and conscience. Markov says (translation mine): "It seems to me that the connection between cult and dogma is natural. There is no cult without dogma. Buying into a cult simplifies personal responsibility, and buying into dogma simplifies intellectual responsibility. Buying into a cult, one can justify erring. Buying into dogma, one can justify not thinking." I can't help but draw some parallels between what Markov describes and some of what is going on in the world of yoga and asana these days.

For more on shoulders, I recently led a workshop on handstand and forearm balance, which discussed the shoulders in this context. Here is a link to the handout I distributed. As always, I hope it is helpful and stimulating, and would love to hear any and all comments, feedback and questions.

p.s. The title of this post comes from the etymological origin of rhomboids. In English, this muscle’s name is the magician’s circle, or oblique angled parallelogram-shaped muscle. The term rhomboid is derived from the Greek rhombos meaning “a magician’s circle,” a shape represented by an oblique angled parallelogram.