Pull up a chair and let’s talk about your upper back muscles. There. You just used ’em. No, that wasn’t a trick. In fact, you use your upper back muscles whenever you pull anything toward you, whether it’s a piece of furniture, a stubborn golden retriever on a leash, or the mountain of chips you won at your Thursday night poker game.
Your upper back consists of several
- Latissimus dorsi (lats): The largest muscles in your back run from just behind each armpit to the center of your lower back. Olympic swimmers, particularly those who swim butterfly, have well developed lats. These muscles give swimmers that V-shaped torso. The main purpose of your lats is to pull your arms (and anything in your hands) toward your body.
- Trapezius (traps): Above the lats are your two traps. Together, your traps look like a large kite that runs from the top of your neck to the edge of your shoulders and narrows down through the center of your back. Your traps enable you to shrug your shoulders (like when your spouse asks how you could’ve forgotten to pay the phone bill). More important, your lower traps stabilize your shoulders and help prevent shoulder injuries and your upper traps help you to move your head to the back, side, or to look behind you.
- Rhomboids: Your rhomboids cover the area between your spine and your shoulder blades. Along with your traps, you use your rhomboids for squeezing your shoulder blades together. You have to call them your rhomboids, because boids somehow never caught on. Most people who work long hours at computers or in other seated positions have overstretched and weak rhomboids.
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