How To “Sculpt” Your Serratus Anterior (STOP Neglecting This Muscle!)

How To “Sculpt” Your Serratus Anterior (STOP Neglecting This Muscle!)

The serratus anterior is one of the most overlooked muscles of the body and should be a staple in your core workouts. The serratus anterior muscle is a fan-shaped muscle located on each of your sides, right on top of the ribs. It functions to protract your shoulder-blades, and assists in upwardly rotating the scapula. This muscle plays a role in improving the aesthetics of your core by improving abs definition, obliques definition, and lower chest definition (for boxer abs). But more importantly, it plays a critical role in stabilizing and facilitating proper movement of our scapula. When weakened, it can lead to unwanted movement within the shoulder joint and the shoulder blades, such as scapular winging. To mitigate this, I’ll show you 3 of the best serratus anterior exercises to add to your ab workout to develop your serratus anterior and get it to start firing properly.

Let’s start with the push-up plus.

By performing a “plus” component, where you protract your shoulder blades at the top of the pushup position by pushing your hands into the ground and slightly rounding your upper back, the activation of the serratus anterior increases by about an additional 50%. And of all the serratus anterior exercises in your workout for abs, the push-up plus elicits the lowest upper trap to serratus anterior activation ratio, which is important because most people with a weak serratus anterior can’t properly activate it; they will tend to overcompensate with their upper traps.

Since the push-up plus can’t account for the upward rotation of the scapula (another serratus anterior muscle function), you’ll need the serratus jabs. To start, set up the resistance by either using a band looped around a fixture or a cable system, and you want to set it up at a low angle. Then, get into the starting position with your arm by your side and all you’re going to do now is perform an upward punching motion which can be broken down into 2 distinct phases. Phase 1 simply involves you punching forward, and then phase 2 involves the active protraction of your scapula at the end of the punch. Then, come back to the starting position with your elbow stopping by your side, and then repeat the movement. Gradually increase the repetitions and/or weight used to continue to further develop your serratus anterior as it gets stronger overtime.

The last of the serratus muscle exercises is the wall slides. It involves even greater arm elevation than the previous exercises, meaning that it helps strengthen the serratus anterior in overhead positions which will again more effectively carryover to your overhead lifts and can help with the common symptom of shoulder pain when the arm gets in overhead positions. A helpful cue is to think about bringing your shoulder blades out and around you as you slide up the wall. But you want to avoid shrugging your traps up excessively and letting the upper traps takeover. To progress this exercise overtime, you can simply stand further out from the wall and lean into the foam roller more.

If you currently experience overhead shoulder pain or scapular winging for example, what you’ll want to do is progress from exercise 1 to exercise 2 to then to exercise 3, since the overhead demands increase throughout each of these exercises.

If there’s no pain and you simply want to better target this muscle, simply throw in a couple sets of each of these exercises 1-2 times per week into your current ab workouts or after your main workouts. Doing so will not only drastically improve your core strength and abs definition, but will also have a host of benefits in terms of improving your overhead stability, strength, and long term shoulder health.

For a step-by-step science-based program that shows you how to train all of these key muscles within your weekly routine, such that you can lean down and improve your muscle definition in the most effective way possible, then simply take the analysis quiz below to discover which built with science program is best for you and where you’re at right now:

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Filmed by: Bruno Martin Del Campo

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STUDIES:

WEAKENED SERRATUS ANTERIOR
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...

PUSH-UP PLUS
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/N...
https://www.jospt.org/doi/pdf/10.2519...

SERRATUS JABS

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...

WALL SLIDES

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...

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