Thoracic Spine Mobility: Flexion, Extension & Rotation

Our thoracic spine consists of 12 independently moveable joints that flex (round forward), extend (think chest up), rotate and laterally flex (think water out of our ear). The principles in spine training are consistent regardless of whether we train cervical, thoracic and lumbar independently or just global spine to tackle the whole thing. Our set up can help bias which portion we train depending on our goal, in this case thoracic spine. If you get back pain during any of these exercises, you simply don’t meet tissue specific benchmarks to execute these particular exercises. Flexion, extension or rotation intolerances are a trainable quality that can addressed. A proper assessment or pain-free trial and error can help you narrow down what you may need as an individual. For those whose spine is pain free and train-able, improving the function of your thoracic spine can significantly improve how effectively you are training your upper body. All rows, bench presses, shoulder and arm exercises have contributions from your thoracic spine. The better it functions, the more bank for your buck you are getting out of your other exercises that are designated for building muscle. For this workout we did one exercise for each flexion, extension, rotation and did it in this order due to the nature of how tissue in the spine functions: linear tissue (flexion/extension stuff) is deeper within our spinal column, thus making it our priority to facilitate better function of all subsequent exercises. Flexion was trained through a barbell Jefferson Curl, but a seated variation. Being seated in hip flexion and posterior pelvic tilt reduces how much potential movement we can get at our lumbar spine, in turn placing more demand on our thoracic. If we do Jefferson Curls standing, and you should, you are highly probable to get lower back engagement. This isn’t wrong, just different. For what we wanted this workout, seated was the best option. This is also a good way to ease someone into training spine flexion who has pain doing a standing variation, build capacity from here and progress from there. The goal of the Jefferson Curl is to lengthen posterior/progressive/backside spine tissue. Following flexion, we moved to extension training. For extension we did passive range holds (PRH). Passive range holds are simply just holding range of motion you don’t “own”, in an effort to bridge passive range to active, usable range of motion. The resistance band being anchored from behind yourself, allows the band to pull you into passive extension, range that you wouldn’t have been able to access and train otherwise. From here all we do is release the band, forcing ourselves to maintain that range but contracting and shortening our posterior spine as much as possible. We finished by training thoracic rotation through a traditionally done cable trunk rotation drill, but again a seated variation. Just like with the Jefferson Curl, doing a normally done cable rotation seated biases our upper back due to the orientation our pelvis is in. We are less likely to not just rotate at the lumbar spine, but pelvis too. Within doing rotation here, we can add “layers” of specificity to what we are targeting by adding degrees of both flexion and extension, while rotating. To top it all off and “save the work”, we did thoracic spine biased segmentation. The goal here was to reinforce how well our nervous system retains the training stimulus we gave it. A traditionally done “catcow” could be done for sure, but doing it in this manner helps prevent excessive lumbar, cervical or scapula movement.