Scapula

Have you been told your upper body needs to be more active?!?

A dancer is always required to keep their upper body active. Understanding how to keep your upper body moving constantly can be difficult, especially when trying to maintain correct lower body movement. While dancing, you are required to alternate lowering between scapulae. Understanding how this affects the other actions in your body is the long-term goal. In order to understand how your scapula will affect the rest of the body, you must understand how your scapula works independently. This will allow you to understand the range of movement you have in your scapula, which will make the effects of your scapula more clear when combining with other actions. A common approach to creating upper body movement is to focus on using your latissimus dorsi (lats) muscles; your muscles will control your joints, which makes understanding proper position a necessity. 

Enjoy the illustration below and click here to view exercises to help improve proper position and use of your scapulae.