Edited by Dr. Francesca Fanolla
Gorilla or body builder?
In my experience as a weight room instructor I have noticed and I continue to notice, alas !, to the great regret that weight training can be "harmful" to postural purposes if performed with little attention and excessive superficiality.
Each of us, "fitness lovers, " will surely have seen dozens of hypertrophic men wandering around dumbbells and barbells with the classic "gorilla" bearing, as I call it, ie with "falling" shoulders forward,
chest encased between them and accentuated dorsal kyphotic attitude.
The fact is that, especially men, they have a deleterious preference for the mythical "flat bench with barbell, on which they spend hours, days, months giving the soul to lift more and more load.
Naturally all this leaving aside the training and the care of the back of the bust which, in my opinion, has a much more important importance for the postural and aesthetic purposes.
The musculature of the "pectorals" has the function of adducting the arms, that is, bringing them forward, not by chance the classic single-articular exercises for these muscles such as the crosses on the bench or the crossover to the cables develop the maximum concentric contraction precisely adducing forward, on the sagittal plane, arms.
If these muscles are excessively exercised, therefore strengthened, with consequent "shortening of hypertonia, hypo-extensibility and retraction, they cause the kyphotic attitude with" falling "of the shoulder stumps forward (and with consequent cervical hypercyphosis of compensation).
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), adductors of the scapulae and therefore abductors of the arms present hyperesthesia, hypotonic, then they do not properly perform their antagonistic function in the pectorals.
Therefore, in order to avoid this "disaster", which greatly spoils the aesthetics of a beautifully formed physique, it would be very important to train the muscles of the back, posterior deltoids and trapezius with exercises that I would dare to define as "postural" the pulley with a high close grip (accentuating with a correct breathing the adduction of the shoulder blades in the concentric phase), the vertical row with a high wide grip (with elbows rising at the height of the shoulders) and the lateral risers with a torso flexed with dumbbells ( taking care to perform them "slowly" and with a technical precision that borders on perfection ...).
For the pectorals, in the case in which they are "stronger" than the back, I suggest to do a lot of stretching to try to give them the maximum elasticity possible and maybe train them with fewer sets and not necessarily always on Mondays, when we are full of energy, so we choose the muscles to be favored over others.
Weights, muscles to "go go 'but .... erect bust, chest out and head high !!!
Posture and bodybuilding
