The embrace is an important part of tango, as is good balance. Both can be affected by poor alignment of the shoulder girdle. As many of us have desk jobs and/or spend a lot of hours hunched over our phones and computers, most of us need remedial work to re-align our bodies for best balance, tango, and pain-free daily life.
Understanding how the shoulders should be stacked on the body helps us to monitor our own axis and remedy issues before they affect our partner in the dance—or before they send us to the chiropractor! Also, most of us need to do some stabilization exercises to help our shoulders remain in the right position so that we are not injured while dancing.
Collarbones
Structure
In terms of bony connections, our arms are attached to our torso only at the sternum. Those joints can move up and down; forward and backward; and rotate slightly, reacting to how the shoulder blades and arms move. Have you noticed that someone with a broken collarbone cannot use their arm? That’s because the rest of the attachments to the body are muscle, ligament, tendon, and fascia, not bone.
Tuning into your collarbones
Put your fingers on the connection between your collarbone and your sternum. You should be able to feel little depressions under your fingers where the bones connect.
Now trace your collarbones out to your shoulder joints and feel where they connect to the structure (you might have to do one at a time). If you have ever broken your collarbone, the two sides may feel VASTLY different!
Now, place your thumbs at the front of your shoulder joint and your pinky fingers at the sternum, and experiment with how high/low you can wing your collarbone (I think of it like butterfly wings flapping up and down).
Next, try front and back movement, like opening and closing a book.
Lastly, try to rotate your shoulder joints and feel what happens at your sternum.
Shoulder blades
Structure
The outer end of the collarbone connects to the scapula (shoulder blade). The shoulder blades slide on the back of the ribs, attached to the body by muscles and via the collarbone to the skeleton. They can move up and down your back (elevation and depression). They also move towards the sides of your body (abduction/protraction) and towards your spine (adduction/retraction). On top of that, they can rotate up or down: it helps me to think about holding a door handle and twisting it clockwise or counterclockwise—away from the spine is down. All these motions are possible because of the muscles attaching to the shoulder blades, anchoring them to the rest of the body.
Tuning into your shoulder blades
This is the area I had to work on the most to find the optimal position(s) for my shoulders to take for tango and general alignment (no surprise, it’s the same).
Shoulder blade pushups
I do these from “tabletop” position, on my hands and knees, but if you have bad knees, you can do this with your palms on a chair. If you know cat-cow exercises from yoga, this is a modified version of that.
Put your palms flat on the floor.
Rotate your arms slightly so that your elbows are pointing back along your ribs.
Straighten your arms, but don’t lock your joints.
Feel your inhale and exhale of your breath and keep breathing!
On your inhale, squeeze your shoulder blades in and down your back towards your hips/spine. Send your heart forward, as if the shoulder blades are pushing it forward.
On your exhale, slide your shoulder blades away from your spine, pulling your heart up between them.
Do NOT curve/arch your spine, just focus on your shoulder blades and upper back! This is a small movement and may be hard to do if it’s new to you. It’s ok if almost no motion happens: you are tuning in to a part of you that you may not have tried to move independently before!
Anchor your shoulder blades!
Many of us tend to squeeze our shoulder blades together and push our ribs out in front when told to stand up straight. Um, that’s not aligned! Let’s try something different:
Grab two soup cans (or light weights).
Start with them at your sides, hands rotated to face mostly forward.
Let your shoulder blades drop down your back, slide out and up, so that your arms float out to the sides, up, and over your head. Touch the long sides of the soup cans together and feel where your shoulder blades are. Hopefully, they are still anchored down into your spine and hips!
Notice if your shoulders are bunched around your head. Relax them, and start part 2:
Reach the soup cans up above your head until they separate, and then arc your arms down to your sides, back to the starting position. Repeat.
Keep your arms long (again, don’t lock things) all the way down. I think of this as a heart-shaped movement, from my neck/head, out and down to a point at my legs.
If you are having trouble feeling your shoulder blade movement, have someone put their hands on your shoulder blades to help you focus on them. If you are solo right now, you can lie on the ground with your knees up and soles of the feet on the floor, and basically make snow angels :-)
We want our shoulder blades to be anchored lightly down and in, without squeezing back. However, depending on where you habitually have your shoulders, this might FEEL like a squeeze back, or a pulling down. Most of us have our shoulders too far forward and/or up. If yours are too far back, you may even feel the correct position as a forward fold!
If you are not sure of your positioning, take a photo of yourself from the side and make sure your shoulder joint is right over your hips, and you can draw a line from there through the middle of your arch of your feet!
Arms/Shoulder joint
I will save this for later: that’s more than most people read anyway!
What if none of that works?
If you have worked on your alignment, faithfully done exercises for a while, and are still having trouble keeping your shoulder girdle in the right place, consider consulting a chiropractor, a Rolfer, or someone else who can evaluate if you have adhesions that are keeping your body stuck where you don’t want it. A session or two of myofascial release might do the trick.
Because I have weak shoulders, I have had to spend a LOT of time getting work done to untangle the knots I used to get from leading tango and having people clutch my shoulder for balance. After body work, targeted daily exercises from my trainer, and now daily yoga work, I have much stronger and better aligned shoulders. Be patient: years of poor posture cannot be undone just by thinking about it for a week!