Chair dance for clavicle mobility

The clavicle, or collar bone, sits across the front of the ribcage at the top. It's attached to the sternum - the vertical breastbone - at the midline of the body, and to the acromion - the point of the shoulder blade - at the outer end.

For the purposes of this video, I'm thinking about the sternoclavicular joint (middle of the chest) as the hinge, and looking at how the lateral (outer) end of the bone moves up and down.

There are lots of reasons why your clavicle might not move well. You might have stiffness around your shoulder joint, or your shoulder blade. You might have muscle spasm around your neck or your pectorals. You might have a stiff ribcage... or even just a stiff sternoclavicular ligament - could be one or more of all sorts of things going on!

The chair dance doesn't tell you why you might have a stiff clavicle, but it's one of the tests I've found useful to see whether your clavicle is stiff. I use it especially when I'm seeing patients online, as it's quite a useful visual, and an easy way to compare each side. I can see asymmetry, and my patient can usually feel it!

And then when we've tested out some treatment ideas, we can repeat the chair dance test, and see whether the treatment has helped.

I've made this video to accompany my blog post, https://nellmead.com/2021/04/12/onlin... - which explains how I used the Chair Dance (among other tests) to work out why Adam's shoulder was misbehaving.

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