What Are Your Rhomboids & Why Are They Important ?

Have you ever heard of your rhomboid muscles before? Most of us are familiar with our traps, delts and pecs.. but our rhomboids tend to get left behind, especially when designing a workout program.

Our rhomboid muscles are located within our upper back beneath our trap muscle, and consist of both the Rhomboid Major and Minor. They originate from our vertebrae and insert to our scapula, making it an important muscle in shoulder stability and movement. Injury, weakness or loss of functioning nerves to the rhomboids can create “winging” of the scapula and rotate the shoulder inwards. The rhomboids are important in movements such as pulling and have been shown to play a large role in actions like throwing and other overhead movements. Mainly, the problem must of us have though is our posture. This is where we tend to hear about our shoulder and trapezius muscles, but not always the rhomboids.

The rhomboid muscles play a role in our posture and when they become weak, imbalanced or injured our daily life can change. This is why we must strengthen our rhomboid muscles and ensure we train our upper back specifically in our workouts. When we have pain in our t-spine area from poor posture, these muscles along with our trapezius and other small spinal muscles become weak and permanently lengthened. Ensuring we are keeping mobility in our routine will help prevent impingement and avoiding over training the chest and deltoid muscles. If you are training chest and shoulders or doing a “push” day some may call it, you will want to include at least one exercise focusing on the upper back still as well. It will involve squeezing between the shoulder blades and be more of a “pull” like motion.

Some examples for exercises to work the rhomboids/upper back and improve our posture include…..

Dumbbell Rear Delt Fly

Keep the weight light and a slight bend in the elbows as you go. This can be strenuous on the lower back, and can also be done on an incline bench with the front of your body laying across the back instead.

Face Pulls

A bit better for those who may have low back issues with the first exercise, can be done with a cable machine or resistance band. (or trx too! ).

Band Pull Aparts

Squeeze between shoulder blades to bring band apart, keep arms straight and try to avoid lifting or “elevating” the shoulders are you go! * Another great variations of this exercise can be done with the cables, also known as a cross over.

These exercises can be thrown into any workout, if you’re already someone that exercises regularly just try to make sure you have something like one of these in your routine!

Happy exercising :)