If your shoulders feel stiff, your upper back feels tight, or lifting your arms overhead just doesn’t feel quite right, then you’re not alone. These are some of the most common complaints I hear and the go-to assumption is almost always the same: stretch more.

But here’s the thing. Stretching alone isn’t the fix.

Mobility isn’t just about how far you can move. It’s about how much control you have through that range. You can be flexible and still lack real, functional mobility because flexibility is passive (your body being moved) while mobility is active (your body doing the moving, with intention and stability behind it).

So what’s actually going on when your shoulders and upper back feel restricted?

It usually comes down to three things working, or not working, together:

Your thoracic spine (the middle and upper section of your back, where your ribs attach) is designed to rotate and extend. But a lot of us spend hours a day in positions that discourage both — hunched over a desk, a steering wheel, or a phone. Over time, that area can become stiff and start to lose range.

Your ribcage moves with your thoracic spine. When the thoracic spine is stiff, the ribcage can’t move freely either and that matters more than most people realise, because your shoulder blade sits on your ribcage. It glides across it every time you lift, reach, or press.

Your shoulder blade (scapula) needs to move freely and be well controlled to position your shoulder joint properly. If the thoracic spine is stiff and the ribcage isn’t moving, the shoulder blade can’t do its job and the shoulder itself has to pick up the slack, often in ways it wasn’t designed to.

This is why so many people stretch their chest and shoulders religiously and still feel tight. The restriction often isn’t in the shoulder, it’s in the system around it.

A solution is to restore movement through the thoracic spine and ribcage, teach the shoulder blade to move well on the ribcage and then build strength and control through those ranges so the mobility you gain actually sticks.

The exercises

Improve shoulder joint control

Most mobility work focuses on range but range without control is where injuries happen. Your shoulder is a ball and socket joint with enormous freedom of movement, which is exactly what makes it vulnerable. The muscles around the joint need to be able to guide and own that movement, not just passively allow it.

When shoulder joint control is poor, you’ll often see the neck and upper traps overworking, the shoulder blade winging away from the ribcage, or movement that looks fine but feels unstable or uncomfortable under load. Building joint control means teaching the shoulder to move with intention so it can handle the demands you put on it in training and everyday life.

Shoulder CARs (Controlled Articular Rotations) CARs are one of the most effective tools for maintaining and improving shoulder joint health over time. By moving slowly and deliberately through the full available range under muscular tension, you’re training the nervous system to own those end ranges. Done consistently, they help keep the joint healthy, reduce stiffness and improve the quality of movement in everything else you do. I like to do these up against a wall to really avoid my body wanting to cheat through the movement.

Supine KB screwdriver I love this exercise because the weight of the kettlebell gives you immediate, honest feedback. You’ll quickly discover where your control drops off (usually at the end ranges of rotation) which passive stretching would never reveal. The rotational screwing motion challenges the deep stabilisers of the shoulder in a way that pressing and pulling movements don’t, making it a valuable complement to more traditional strength work. It’s especially effective for people rebuilding shoulder confidence after injury or postpartum, where joint awareness tends to be the missing piece.

Restore thoracic rotation

Your thoracic spine is built to rotate. When thoracic rotation is limited, the body doesn’t just stop rotating. It finds the movement elsewhere — usually from the lower back, the neck, or the shoulder joint itself. Over time, that compensation adds up.

Restoring thoracic rotation directly impacts how well you can press, pull, carry, and rotate under load. It’s also a direct link between breathing mechanics, pressure management and core and pelvic floor function. A thoracic spine that moves well takes pressure off the joints above and below it, and creates the foundation for almost every upper body movement you do in training. You’ll see this a lot in my programs!

Side Lying Thoracic Rotation with Pulldown: The pull-down component actively encourages the ribcage to drive the movement, rather than the arm leading and the trunk lagging behind. This makes it far more effective for people who have been doing rotation drills for a while and still feel like they’re not getting into their upper back. It also tends to be well-tolerated by people with a history of lower back sensitivity, as the side-lying position naturally limits lumbar movement and keeps the rotation where it’s supposed to be.

Tall Kneeling Cable Rotation: By removing the hips and lower body from the equation (tall kneeling setup), you’re forced to find rotation through the thoracic spine.. Hugging a med ball into the chest keeps the arms connected to the trunk, so the rotation is driven by the whole upper body rather than just swinging the arms.If you do not have a med ball, it can be performed with arms straight out in front of your chest like shown and is still effective at training rotation. The cable adds resistance throughout the movement, meaning you’re building strength through it, which is ultimately what makes the mobility transfer into your training.

Train the scapula to move on the ribcage

This is probably the most overlooked piece of the shoulder mobility puzzle and often the most impactful when you start to address it.

Your shoulder blade isn’t fixed to your ribcage. It glides across it and that movement is essential for healthy, efficient shoulder function. Every time you lift your arm, reach overhead, or press a weight, your scapula should be moving — tilting, rotating and repositioning to keep your shoulder joint in the best possible position throughout the movement.

When scapula movement is poor, whether through weakness, stiffness, or simply never having been trained, the shoulder joint ends up doing far more work than it should. This is one of the most common underlying causes of shoulder impingement, clicking and general discomfort during upper body training. It’s also extremely common postpartum, where a combination of postural changes during pregnancy and the repetitive demands of feeding and carrying can leave the muscles that control the scapula significantly underworked.

½ Kneeling Rotational Serratus Slide This drill directly targets the serratus anterior — the muscle most responsible for keeping the shoulder blade flat against the ribcage and driving its upward rotation as the arm lifts. It’s not a muscle most people have ever consciously felt working, which is exactly why this drill tends to be a revelation. The rotational element also means you’re integrating thoracic movement at the same time, which is why I love this particular variation.

Banded Overhead Reach The mini band around the wrists creates just enough external resistance to keep the serratus engaged and discourage the shoulder blades from hiking up towards the ears — a compensation pattern that’s incredibly common, particularly in people who carry a lot of tension in their neck and upper traps. By training the overhead reach pattern with this subtle cue, you’re essentially reprogramming how your body approaches anything overhead. Simple to set up, easy to feel when it’s working, and highly transferable to pressing and lifting movements. A great addition to a warm up on a push day workout.

Build shoulder stability

Mobility without stability is just flexibility and flexibility alone won’t protect you under load. This is the final piece of the puzzle and arguably the most important one if your goal is to actually use your improved range in training.

Shoulder stability is the right muscles being active at the right time, in the right sequence, to support the joint as it moves. When that system is working well, pressing, pulling, and carrying feel solid and controlled. When it’s not, you’ll often notice a vague sense of weakness or instability, discomfort at certain points in a lift, or a tendency to compensate through the neck and lower back.

Building stability through range is what makes mobility training actually carry over into how you move and lift.

Side Plank Banded Row Holding a side plank already demands trunk stability and shoulder girdle control from the bottom arm. Adding a row with the top arm introduces a rotational pull that the whole system has to resist and control. The shoulder, scapula, and trunk are forced to work together making this far more functional than isolated stability exercises. It’s also a brilliant way to challenge the serratus and the deep shoulder stabilisers simultaneously, building on everything the earlier drills have worked on.

½ Kneeling Landmine Cross Press The cross body pressing pattern here is what makes this exercise particularly valuable. Pressing the landmine diagonally across your body from the opposite side creates a strong rotational demand through the trunk, which the body has to resist while simultaneously stabilising through the shoulder during the press. The half kneeling position removes the lower body as a source of compensation, so there’s nowhere to hide. This is definitely a drill I would recommend progressing too once you feel confident in your traditional landmine press set up.

How to use these

You don’t need to do all 8 in one session. In fact, trying to do everything at once is one of the most common reasons mobility work doesn’t stick — it becomes a lengthy routine that’s hard to sustain, rather than a practice that fits naturally into your training.

Instead, pick one or two exercises from each category and add them into your upper body warm-up before your main session. Even ten minutes of intentional mobility work, done consistently before you train, will do far more than an occasional dedicated mobility session. The warm up context is particularly valuable because you’re priming the movement patterns you’re about to use so the work has an immediate place to go.

What matters most is consistency. Mobility adapts slowly but it does adapt. A few of these drills, repeated regularly over several weeks, will create far more lasting change than you’d expect.

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Inside the LWE app, these kinds of drills are built into the warm ups within the strength programs — so the mobility work actually carries over into your lifts, rather than existing separately from them. Programs available for pregnancy, postpartum and beyond. Try 7 days free.