I’m at my daughter’s softball practice for her game last week, and I’m looking around for something when all of a sudden something comes and hits me in the face. I didn’t know what had happened…
The head coach had been warming up the girls by hitting balls off the bat, and I was standing sort of near him, but definitely far enough away to stay out of his way.
My first thought was: “Did he just hit me in the face with the bat?” It hurt really bad.
I had been hit in the nose and top part of my mouth a little over to the left side. I immediately had a TON of pain in my right temple. I bent down and was holding my nose and face. Then I noticed blood on my hands and I was tasting blood in my mouth. Now I’m starting to think I broke my nose…
Well, I couldn’t see it, but people rushed and got me an ice pack. While I had a little bit of a cut on my cheek, the majority of the damage was to the inside of my mouth. I’m very lucky to have not lost any teeth or have gotten hit in the eye.
But still a couple days later, not only did I have a headache, but it was almost as if I had gotten whiplash!
It hurt to sleep at night, my head was bothering me, I was tossing and turning, and now the right side of my head and neck was killing me too.
The ironic thing was that I was planning on posting a blog post to talk about the posture in the EXACT area that was now hurting me! But for about 2 days, I had a splitting headache, swelling in my face, and I was feeling pretty out of it and spacey.
While my wife was telling me to go to the doctor, I was of course stubborn and knew I had most likely suffered a concussion and just needed to rest. After a couple days of doing my best to stay off electronics (I definitely wasn’t perfect), I got through it and was able to get caught up last week.
Well, caught up except for wanting to send out the latest in my blog series about that posture of the upper back!
So, here you go- sorry for the delay, but better late than never!
Now we can finally talk about those rhomboids…
These are the muscles in your upper back that attach onto your spine and insert onto your shoulder blade. They are SO important in holding your shoulders back so they don’t round forward.
They act as an antagonist to the tight pec muscles in the front, and if you didn’t get a chance to see my other post about the pecs, you’ll want to go here and check that out.
Now while we want to STRETCH the pec muscles to pull those shoulders back, it’s important to STRENGTHEN the rhomboids. Here’s a video that shows an exercise you can do around the house to get those rhomboids firing properly and correct that posture:
