Bridge Drills in Gymnastics
If you’re looking for exercises to open up shoulder flexibility for bridges and any other skill that requires open shoulders, using drills that activate the brain can unlock new ranges of motion and do it in less time.
Shoulder flexibility for bridges in gymnasts is critical for so many reasons. Among the first is being able to do skills that are required from basic to Elite levels. Without sufficient range of motion in the shoulders, it becomes difficult (or painful) to achieve skills that move through a bridge.
Without sufficient shoulder flexibility for bridges and other skills that require open shoulders, gymnasts will tend to compensate by depending on greater range of motion from the low back, leading to compressive forces which can contribute to pain at a minimum, and over time can lead to vertebral fractures or other injuries.
Wrists can also bear the burden of inflexible shoulders, again, as a compensatory tactic if a gymnast can’t bring her shoulders back far enough to receive adequate load, the load gets transferred to the wrists, which are less equipped to manage it.
And for many, stretching and other conventional bridge drills in gymnastics don’t lead to improvement, even when done consistently. It can be frustrating.
Enter a Brain-based Approach to Bridge Drills in Gymnasts
What does this mean? We know from decades of neuroscience research that the brain plays a huge role in regulating muscle tone. We can take advantage of the pathways between the brain and shoulder muscles to create change, and do it in less time. This is Neuroperformance Training in a nutshell.
One of the things the brain does (a function primarily of the brainstem) is to help balance the tone and function between flexors (muscles that bring your arms overhead) and extensors (muscles that help keep our shoulders back).
There are other parts of the brain that facilitate getting more flexion or more extension. The exercises below are nothing like traditional shoulder and back flexibility exercises for gymnasts, but you can do them before your usual stretching sequences and you’ll likely be able to get more range of motion.
The Drills
Before you start:
To help with athlete buy-in and to best experience the speed of change that’s possible with these bridge drills to help with upper back and shoulder flexibility in gymnastics:
Assess something:
Test their bridge - they can do bridge rocks to help warm it up
Do a drill
Then reassess exactly the same thing you did initially and notice if you feel a difference.
1. Using Your Eyes: The Orienting Reflex
The orienting reflex is a basic survival reflex that ties eye movement to muscular activation. When we hear or see something around us that we need to pay attention to, our eyes and head will quickly move in that direction (we need to know if something nearby is a threat). This coordination is instinctual, but like many neuroperformance drills, we’re tuning a reflex to boost performance.
What to do:
Bring your shoulders back (arms up or down) as far as you can, hold them there.
Then quickly snap your eyes up or down, hold them, then move into a further range of motion
Pop eyes DOWN for more flexion (arms up)
Pop eyes UP for more extension (arms down)
Repeat 3-4 times, each time advancing the range of motion
2. Using Your Eyes: Smooth Pursuit
This one is activating nerves in parts of the brainstem that facilitate extension. If your shoulders tend to be rolled forward, this one could be really beneficial, though I’ve found it helps improve shoulder flexibility whether or not that’s the case. And because extension of the spine is back-bending, this can be an added boost for bridges, back walkovers, back handsprings, etc.
What to do:
Stand tall, either with feet together or on one foot (balance challenges can create a greater effect)
Keep your head still the whole time - you’re only moving your eyes
Bring a visual target (thumbnail or a pencil eraser) a little outside your shoulder
Move it up and down while watching it the whole time
Do 10 ‘laps’
3. Ice Cream Hands
This one is taking advantage of our brain’s map of our body, known as the homunculus. It helps us know where all of our body parts are, helps identify if there’s something crawling on our skin, and sends commands to either look at that spot and or engage our muscles to slap our hand exactly where we feel the thing on our skin.
The neurons that communicate with our fingers, hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder are all intermingled, so we can affect shoulder muscles by moving our hands and fingers!
What to do:
Imagine you’re wrapping your fingers around a big waffle cone.
Move your fingers & thumb one at a time, then at the end, squeeze and bend your wrist (flexion)
Then starting with the thumb, open up your hand, open your palm and bend your wrist the opposite way (extension)
Repeat 5-8 times
Give these a try! And share these with your gymnasts and other coaches to demonstrate that there are shoulder flexibility exercises for gymnasts that can create changes in as little as 30 seconds.
Check-out these related posts:
If you want to go a bit deeper on the neuroscience and learn additional drills to help changes stick, I have an 80-minute online clinic:
Unlocking Shoulder Flexibility (& Stability!)