The Pectoralis muscles are famous for getting shortened, the reason for this mainly lies in our sedentary lifestyles where many people spend hours a day in front of a desk or computer with protracted shoulders and the arms in internal rotation and adduction.
To assess the length of the pectoralis major instruct your patient to flex the arms to 90 degrees and to bring the hands together behind the head.
From that position, you are going to try to bring the elbows down to the bench.
If you fail to bring the elbows down to the bench this indicates a shortened pectoralis major.
Your patient can also give you information on the sensation of muscle stretch.
21 OF THE MOST USEFUL ORTHOPAEDIC TESTS IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
If you are interested in muscle length assessment of other muscles in the shoulder region, check out our wiki posts below:
What customers have to say about the Assessment E-Book
Vince1992
25/04/20
The Assessment E-Book This book helped me in my studying for my exam and in assessing my first patients. Awesome! Also for beginners!
Simon Pagitz
06/04/20
The Assessment E-Book It’s an amazing Compilation! Congrats to all the work you have put in there. You’ll propably find all the test’s you’ve been looking for with propper explaination and source to doublecheck for you self. definetly a must have for every student, but it will also help an experienced practioner. Im looking forward to the lifelong updates on the topics.
Great work, guys
Jordi Burrut
27/10/19
The Assessment E-Book A must-have for all physiotherapists, osteopaths and manual therapists. The authors conducted an extensive research on assessment tests in manual therapy. I find it very easy to read. The more I read the more I learn. Thank you!
Josh
07/07/19
The Assessment E-Book This book is great! It is very structured and detailed. It works extremely well on my Macbook and iPad.
Polo_soa
15/02/19
The Assessment E-Book The best way to spend 80euros. Totally worth it. The amount of work you put behind this must have been absolutely huge. Every physical or physiotherapist should own it.
Congrats guys you’ve done an incredible job.
I’ve learnd a lot of new things and my approach to therapy in general have totally changed.
In one word: amazing. Keep going guys ! Best wishes from france.
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service. Read more
Functional cookies
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.