Rib pain can be stubborn, but you don’t have to push through it or rely on pain meds. If your chest, upper back or muscles around your chest and shoulders are causing pain or making movement, flexbility or breathing difficult, there is lost you can do. Find out if your pain has a mucular cause and 2 simple tools you can use to release muscle tension, relieve pain and improve mobility (and ease breathing). 

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Rib Pain & Joint Dysfunction

Symptoms, Causes and What You Can Do!

Rib pain isn’t always deep or structural. Sometimes it’s muscular, and if you’ve ever felt pulling tightness or dull ache around your ribs or your chest wall, that might be the cause.

Hi, I’m Alexis Weidland, osteopath and co-founder of BlossomingMe and Healthy Learning Lounge. And today we are breaking down muscle based rib pain, which muscles are usually involved, how posture contributes, and how to release tension at home using a muscle mate.

Causes

Let’s start with the common causes,

Intercostal muscles

the small muscles between each rib. These tighten with shallow breathing or after illness with lots of coughing.

Latissimus Dorsi

Is a big back and side muscle that connects your arms to your ribcage, and it often pulls on the ribcage when you lift and with shoulder tension.

The Serratus anterior

Connect into the front of your shoulder blades and the

Abdominal oblique muscles

Sit like this, connecting, your ribs and your torso and all the fascia. They’re involved in twisting, and they can get sore with overuse or poor trunk control.

Then you’ve got your pecs and your subclavius.

Especially with a forward slouched posture, these can shorten and compress and pull up the ribs.

Muscle Type Rib Pain

• Is often dull or aching.
• It generally is worse with movement or with breathing, and
• It’s easy to replicate when we push on the irritated tight muscle.
• It’s often accompanied by shoulder or neck tension and
• Posture can play a massive role in this.
  • Rounded shoulders,
  • Forward head positioning,
  • Collapsed chest posture

➡️All compress the rib cage.

This causes us to have shallow breathing, and it locks our muscles into a shortened and possibly overstretched position.

Signs Your Muscles are Involved

So here’s what to look for.

• Ribs that don’t move when you breathe,
• Shoulder blades that wing out, sitting upwards.
• Shoulders that head towards your ears.
• Tight upper shoulder muscles.
• Head poking forward.
• Collapsed lower ribs, especially when seated.

What You Can Do

To begin releasing these muscle tensions and improving your posture, here are some things that you can do.

The first one is Postural Awareness.

1. Focus on where your shoulders are sitting.
2. Raise and relax them.
3. Bring them to your ears and ➡️ actually let them go.

Good Posture

• Make sure your ears are sitting directly above the middle of your shoulder.
• Make sure your shoulder is sitting right above the middle of your hip.
• Your elbows should be gently relaxed and slightly behind the midline. So that your chest is gently open.

You can pay attention to this whilst you’re sitting and whilst you’re standing.

You can also set phone alarms to get you to remember to actually stop and reposition yourself.

➡️By doing this regularly throughout the day, you get a general reset switch for your muscles so that your muscles don’t get quite so tight and stuck, in those overused positions.

By doing that,it allows

✅your muscles to take a break, relax,

✅get the circulation that they need again, and,

➡️ they’re therefore more likely, to not stay tight and strained and irritated.

The next one is to use the Muscle Mate

This is great for getting at

• The rib joints at the back, coming right down here and
• Getting at those muscles
  • the intercostals and
  • the muscles on top of that, like your rhomboids and
  • into the subscap and
  • even essentially into the serus anterior, which is quite a deep muscle.
  • You can get at your lats, which is essentially under the armpit in that spot too.

What to Do

So this is great because you can

• access an area by holding it and reaching and
  • just gently pushing in or rubbing, or
  • you can place it on the ground or against the wall and use the elbow style bump to be able to access a relatively small area and quite effectively to get at the joints or to get at the muscle.

How much pressure?

• Gently, using as much pressure as you’re comfortable with, but
• You don’t want to be causing real pain, pain.
  • So it can hurt, but you don’t want it to be irritated-hurt.

You don’t wanna have a sharp pain response.

➡️You want your body to relax into that tension and then begin to let it go.

• And you also don’t want to stay in any one position for more than 10 seconds and
• keep moving further down or further up or around into different areas.
  • This reduces the likelihood of irritating any one area, but by working areas around where it hurts, you’re also getting a more generalized release

➡️ which will improve the release of the pain in the area that you feel it way more than just by focusing on that one spot where you feel the pain.

So using the muscle mate up against the wall or against the floor?

• Against the wall, you’re not using as much tension so it can hurt less.
• But by standing, you’re also activating all of your postural muscles, so you actually have more tension to push through.

➡️It doesn’t matter which way you go and I would recommend starting standing up against the wall .

Example

• You’re just positioning it (the muscle mate) and
• then positioning yourself and
• leaning into it.
  • So I’ve got it just, just under my underarm and I’m just leaning into that.
  • It is also really useful to get at these – pec minor and subclavius and pec major muscles under the collarbone and into the upper front of the rib cage.
• Again, you’re only going to take one spot and hold it for up to 10 seconds, and
• then you’re going to move to a different spot.

Benefits

This tool is great for

✅Increasing circulation into those tight, irritated muscles.

✅ It allows them to reset and relax

✅so that your rib cage is able to move more freely because the muscles that are causing the rib cage to be tight have released, and let go.

So What Now?

If you’ve been living with muscular rib pain, these strategies can really make a big difference.

And the Muscle Mate is one of the best tools that I’ve found to help people to support themselves at home.

It’s all part of what I teach inside the Ribcage Reset mini-course, where we combine breath work, mobility, fascia release, and posture awareness. To relieve rib pain from the inside out. If you’re interested in learning more, click the link below

Got Questions?

So that’s it for today. Did it raise any questions or aha moments? If so, I’d love to hear them. So please put those in the comment section. I love answering questions. I hope you found today useful. And if you know someone who could use this information, please share it. Remember to comment, like and subscribe.

Until next time and in health, bye for now.

Click the Button Below for my RibCage Reset min-course

Interested in further reading?

1. 1. Slipping Rib Syndrome
   2. Slipping Rib Syndrome Symptoms
   3. Costochondritis
   4. Costochondritis Review
   5. Musculoskeletal Chest Wall Pain
   6. More Serious Causes of Rib Pain

About Blossoming Me

BlossomingMe offers a fully integrated approach to your wellbeing. Located on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. Sarah is our Cranio-sacral and Remedial Massage Therapist and health and lifestyle coach. She can help relieve those problematic knots, tightness and other specific ailments to promote a healthy recovery. These complementary massage therapies can be combined to suit your needs, and include: craniosacral therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, remedial, swedish, and body-mind-massage. 

Our qualified Osteopath, Alexis, offers a drug free, minimally invasive, “hands on” treatment focusing on the musculoskeletal system with its associated muscles, tendons, ligaments, membranes, bones and joints. Alexis takes a functional approach. This means that she focuses on the way a component (body part, tissue or group of tissues) performs its role, as well as the way the body works, performs and integrates as a whole. Our team can support you to improve your posture and therefore your overall health.