Self massage then for the upper back, this is gonna be great, not just for this key area here, but this is going to be awesome for any kind of mid upper back even low back pain. You'll see in the exercise that we're actually covering the whole body when we're doing it and I'll show you with my little skeleton here is what happens when you don't pay the bills in my clinic. So we've got muscle tissue running parallel, symmetrical up the spine. Now, when you do this exercise, you're not going on the vertebrae themselves. You're running up the spine through here. Notice how with this individual, this is the muscle tissue running up connecting in the head.

If I was to round forward, see how that puts that flex and stretch all that tissue Well, that's what you're doing through there. So what we want for what happens is the body's trying to protect the spine. So it's going to dense and tighten up that tissue to try and stop you from doing that. So that's why you need to come up a little bit more. That's why the solution isn't just releasing tension in this tissue, because ironically, and I say this to my clients, that if you release here, actually, what you've done is you've removed this protective mechanism that stops you from happening in the first place. So I'm more interested in working the front of people's bodies, and that's what you're gonna be doing in the next series of exercises.

But for this one, you're looking for some immediate relief, releasing some of the tension in particularly if we're looking at this kind of shoulder raised up issue, and you're looking up towards the top here, so extra focus on that for you. But don't miss this whole mid back area which is going to be amazing for you and doing the exercises could relieve a lot of that tension that you've got going in through the mid back. But don't think that it's just a one stop shop as far as That concerns you want to be addressing the front line of the body, because now you're going to remove all this protective mechanism that's tie in. So it's going to feel good for a little while, but it's going to come back more. So we want to be careful about that. But what you're going to see, in the self massage video, I'm suggesting that you get two tennis balls, one either side of the spine.

So you're working these two areas through here and in through there. The reason why I prefer tennis balls over something like a lacrosse ball, is it has a little bit of give to it. We're not trying to destroy tension, we're not trying to destroy the body, which is kind of the old school model of kind of fitness and health is that we, that we have this thing that we can push to its limits and it does what we tell it Look how well that's working out for us now in our in our health systems and how struggling 80% of Americans will have back pain at some point in their life. So clearly, we're not doing something right. So now that we're doing everything wrong, but let's just rethink about this a little bit. So you're looking at working the erector spin is just like in my Tom Meyers Post a here anatomy trains looking at this factual line running up the body there.

And then you would have move the tennis balls up as you go to help release tension all the way up. So enjoy this one it is one of my favorites and don't push it too much. Again, you're not trying to destroy tension, relax on it, breathe. If you don't feel anything too much first time around doesn't mean you're not doing anything. Give it a couple more goes over the next couple of days or later on that day and see how it feels.