Your Shoulder Problem Might Not Be What You Think

By Mira Rasmussen

Exercise Physiologist & Founder of Fitness Beyond Training

Your shoulders feel tight. Maybe you feel that familiar pinching or tightness across the front of your shoulders. Your posture looks off, and your neck and mid-back are starting to feel tight and overworked too. So you search for shoulder exercises. Who wouldn’t?

You find stretches to open up the front of your shoulders, strengthening exercises to pull your shoulders back, and posture drills designed to put everything in the “right” position. Those exercises might help. But there’s a question that needs to come first:

Why are your shoulders ending up there in the first place?

We had a client come in recently asking for exactly what many people are searching for: a list of shoulder exercises to improve her posture. She felt tightness through both shoulders, her neck, and mid-back, along with a pinching tightness at the front of her shoulders. She wanted exercises that would pull her shoulders back, relieve that tension, and ultimately help her move and train better. She expected shoulder exercises. But once we assessed how her body actually moved, we found something very different.

What You Feel and What Your Body Is Doing Can Be Two Different Things

Our client felt fairly equal tension through both shoulders, her mid-back, and her neck. The pinching at the front of her shoulders made it feel even more like a shoulder problem. And nothing about what she felt suggested that one side was functioning much differently from the other.

Based on symptoms alone, treating both shoulders the same would seem logical. Stretch the front of the shoulders, strengthen the muscles that pull the shoulders back, add some rows and shoulder blade exercises, and work on improving her posture.

But that would have been a guess. And the assessment revealed it wouldn't have been the right one. If you don't know why the body is moving or positioning itself a certain way, how do you know the exercises you've chosen are actually addressing the problem?

This is where a list of “the best exercises for rounded shoulders” starts to fall apart.

Two people can have similar postures, feel similar tightness, and even experience discomfort in the same area, yet have completely different reasons for moving that way. And that's exactly what her assessment started to uncover.

What Her Movement Showed Us

When we looked at our client's bigger movement patterns, we found that her thoracic spine and rib cage weren't contributing effectively to the movement. Instead, she was relying heavily on her lats and QL to create movement that should have been better distributed across her upper back, rib cage, and shoulder blades. But there was another important finding.

Although she came in feeling fairly equal tension through both shoulders, her neck, and mid-back, the thoracic assessment began to expose a difference between her right and left sides. As we tested those movements individually, she could actually feel the asymmetry herself. Her initial symptoms felt relatively equal, but her body wasn't functioning equally from side to side.

What she felt was relatively symmetrical. Her movement wasn't.

Now, treating both shoulders exactly the same based on how they looked or felt didn't make much sense, even to her.

The thoracic region became our first target—not because the thoracic spine is the answer to every shoulder problem, but because her assessment showed us that it was an important contributor to hers. And that was good news. Instead of continuing to guess, we finally had a clear place to start.

The discomfort at the front of her shoulders was real. The tension through her neck and back was real. But the location of those symptoms wasn't enough to tell us what needed to be addressed first.

The place that feels tight is giving you information—but it isn't necessarily telling you what is contributing to the problem.

Then We Looked Deeper Into the Shoulders

Finding the thoracic asymmetry gave us a direction, but we weren't finished assessing.

Next, we broke the shoulder down into the smaller movements that demonstrate how the shoulder functions and how well she could control those motions on each side. The shoulder assessments confirmed what we were already seeing. The right and left sides weren't functioning the same way.

Breaking the movement down helped us understand what each shoulder was doing differently.

We found that she had less stability and

control during specific movements on the left, while the right side appeared to be taking on more of the workload. This helped explain some of the compensations we had already seen during the thoracic assessment and, more importantly, gave us our next steps for addressing the shoulders themselves. That's an important distinction.

The smaller shoulder assessments didn't uncover the original asymmetry. They helped us understand it. We started with the bigger picture, identified the thoracic region as our first target, and then used more specific assessments to determine what each shoulder needed next.

Had we skipped that process and simply handed her the same set of exercises for both forward shoulders, we would have missed the differences that mattered most.

Bigger Movements Give Us Clues. Smaller Assessments Give Us Detail.

This is why we don't believe one movement can tell us everything we need to know about someone's body.

An overhead squat can reveal movement limitations, but it’s only the beginning of the assessment.

An overhead squat, shoulder press, or other larger movement can give us valuable clues. It can't always tell us exactly why something is happening or what we should do about it until we break the movement into smaller pieces. That's very different from looking at forward shoulders and assuming we already know the solution. And that's the point of assessment: not to find the same answer in everyone, but to find the right starting point for the person standing in front of us.

This Is Why We Assess Before We Correct

This may sound like more work than simply being handed a list of exercises, but in reality, it can save a tremendous amount of time.

It's frustrating to stretch something because it feels tight, strengthen something because you assume it's weak, and continually add new exercises while wondering why the same problem keeps returning. Assessment gives us a way to stop guessing.

That doesn't mean stretching is bad. It doesn't mean rows, shoulder exercises, or posture drills are bad either. The question is whether those exercises address what your body actually needs.

For our client, what she felt was tightness through her shoulders, neck, and mid-back, along with that familiar pinching sensation at the front of her shoulders. What we uncovered went beyond the areas where she felt the symptoms. Her movement strategy involved her thoracic spine, rib cage, shoulder blades, and differences in control between her right and left sides. Now we had somewhere meaningful to start.

Instead of continually chasing the areas that felt tight, we could begin improving the movement and control her body was missing so the overworked areas didn't have to keep picking up the slack.

And that's the difference between simply being given exercises and having exercises chosen for a reason.

If you're searching for shoulder exercises because your shoulders feel tight, pinch in the front, sit forward, bother you during training, or simply don't move the way you want them to, don't assume another stretch or strengthening exercise is automatically the answer.

Once you understand what your body is struggling to do, you have a much clearer place to start. Instead of guessing which muscles to stretch or strengthen, you can focus on the movements your body actually needs. And that's where progress can start. Your body can learn and adapt when you give it the right input. The goal isn't more exercises. It's the right exercises for you.

At Fitness Beyond Training, we're not trying to find the “best” shoulder exercise or change movement with a one-size-fits-all approach. We're trying to find the right exercises for the person in front of us.

If you're tired of guessing which exercises your body needs, start with a movement assessment. Register here.

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