By Dr. Francesca Fanolla
Gorilla or body builder?
In my experience as a weight room instructor I have noticed and continue to notice, alas !, with great regret how "harmful" weight training can be for postural purposes if done with little attention and excessive superficiality.
Each of us, "lovers" of fitness, will surely have seen dozens of hypertrophic men wandering between dumbbells and barbells with the classic "gorilla" posture, as I define it, that is, with the shoulders "drooping" forward,
chest embedded between them and accentuated dorsal kyphotic attitude.
The fact is that, especially men, have a deleterious predilection for the mythical "flat bench with a barbell, on which they spend hours, days, months giving the soul to lift more and more load.
Of course all this leaving out the training and care of the back of the torso which, in my opinion, has a much more relevant importance for postural and therefore aesthetic purposes.
The "pectoral" musculature has the function of adducing the arms, that is to bring them forward, it is no coincidence that the classic single-joint exercises for these muscles such as crosses on the bench or crossovers with cables develop the maximum concentric contraction precisely by adducing forward, on the sagittal plane, the arms.
If these muscles are excessively exercised, then strengthened, with consequent "shortening" from hypertonia, hypoextensibility and retraction, they cause the "kyphotic attitude with" falling "of the stumps of the shoulders forward (and with consequent compensatory cervical hyperkyphosis).
In this case, the posterior muscles of the torso such as the trapezius, the upper part of the back and the posterior deltoid (almost always neglected in favor of the anterior and lateral one), adductors of the shoulder blades and therefore abductors of the arms are hyperextended, hypotonic, therefore they do not properly perform their antagonistic function of the pectorals.
Therefore, in order to avoid this "disaster" which among other things greatly ruins the aesthetics of a well-formed physique, it would be necessary to give great importance to the training of the back muscles, posterior deltoids and trapezius with exercises that I would dare to define "postural" such as the pulley with a high narrow grip (accentuating with correct breathing the adduction of the shoulder blades in the concentric phase), the vertical row with a wide grip high (with elbows rising to shoulder height) and the lateral raises with bent torso with dumbbells ( taking care to perform them "slowly" and with a technical precision that borders on perfection ...).
For the pectorals, in case they are "stronger" than the back, I recommend doing a lot of stretching to try to give them the maximum possible elasticity and maybe train them with a few less sets and not necessarily always on Mondays, when we are full of energy, so we choose the muscles to be privileged over others.
Weights yes, muscles to "go go" but .... erect torso, chest out and head held high !!!
Posture and bodybuilding
Posture and well-being
