I always have a good excuse to work out. The serratus posterior is the largest muscle in my back, and the only one that stays active when I’m not working out. This is why I don’t like the term “posterior” as used by most health and fitness professionals. It implies that one needs to spend a certain amount of effort strengthening the muscles before getting to work.
It turns out that there are actually several muscles in my back that stay active when I’m not working out. One is my lats, which are the large muscles that sit behind my ears. You can see them a little bit in the image below.
The lats are also what the title of this article is all about. The lats are part of my lumbar spine. They sit on the inner side of my back and help me move my hips and lower back. The lats are very important because they are the sole source of energy for my entire lumbar spine.
The lats are one of the two main muscles that work to keep you from having a stroke. In the image below, you can see that the lats are still strong enough to keep me upright. Unfortunately, not all of us have the lats to be as strong.
This is where a lot of people get confused when they hear the term “serratus posterior,” because the lats do not sit in the lower back, but in the region of the mid-back, called the serratus anterior.
If you’re wondering why the lats are not as strong as they used to be, this is because we’ve been told that the lats have degenerated. This means that they no longer generate enough force to keep me from falling over. Of course, if I were to fall over, I’d just fall down into the ground.
So lets talk about the serratus anterior first. It is the area that lies just above the lats. It is here that the lats connect with the rest of the spinal cord. When the lats are strong, the anterior serratus pushes against the spinal cord, and helps it to lengthen. It also helps to stabilize the lumbar spine, and prevents it from kinking.
By activating the serratus anterior, we can get into a position where we can help the spinal cord to lengthen. This is the same idea as the serratus posterior exercise that we talked about earlier, except here it’s the lumbar spine that is lengthened. If there’s a problem with the lumbar spine, we can help it out with the serratus anterior.
The first time we were in this position we had to stop and fix the kinks in the spine. The serratus posterior exercise helps with that, too. Because when the serratus posterior is activated, the lumbar spine lengthens, and we move it forward with our bodies.
As we mentioned earlier, the serratus posterior exercise is very useful for lengthening the lumbar spine.
