What Is a Muscular Imbalance?
A muscular imbalance occurs when muscles surrounding a joint have different levels of tension caused by tightness or weakness. Muscular imbalances can be caused from a number of different factors such as working one muscle group more than others. Additionally, it also happen from overuse or repetitive actions in the work force.
Two Common Muscular Imbalances
Muscular imbalances can happen anywhere. Two common muscular imbalances often happen with your hip flexors and the muscles at the front of your shoulder joint.
Hip flexors can get extremely tight from a sedentary lifestyle, Do you find you do one of the following?
- Work a desk Job
- Drive long periods of time throughout the day
- Watch a lot of television
- Sitting down behind any screen
If you said yes to any of the following, you may be doing actions that could contribute to tight hip flexors. These actions put your hips in a constant state of flexion. This will create tightness in the area as the muscle fibers will constantly be shortening.
Learn how to identify if you have tight or weak muscles.
Another common muscular imbalance happens at your shoulder joint. The muscles at the front like your anterior delts and chest muscles can often become really tight. Do you find you are doing any of the following a lot?
- Texting
- Typing
- Sitting down in a hunched over position
- Working out your chest more than external rotators of the shoulder
If you answered yes to any of the above it would be a good idea to make sure you are stretching your anterior shoulder muscles. Here are 4 more shoulder stretches to address tight anterior deltoid muscles.
Check out the video below to find a couple tools to help fix muscular imbalances
Keep your body healthy and happy by addressing and fixing your muscle imbalances. Do you have any tips for others? Let us know in the comments below!
