Why Upper Trap Pain Might Actually Be a Shoulder Blade Problem.

Upper trap pain when turning your head can come from an uneven shoulder blade position, not just a tight trap muscle. In the case described by Squat University, a patient felt pain in her right upper trap every time she turned her head to the left. A shoulder blade assessment showed her right shoulder blade sat in a more downwardly rotated position compared to the left side.

To confirm the connection, the shoulder blade was manually protracted forward into a more normal position while she turned her head again. The pain vanished immediately, showing the trap pain was directly tied to how the shoulder blade was sitting on the rib cage — not a problem in the trap tissue itself.

Fixing a downwardly rotated shoulder blade takes two steps: releasing the tight muscles pulling it out of position, then strengthening the muscle that should be controlling it. Squat University walked through the exact sequence used with this patient:

1. Soft tissue work: Use a lacrosse ball for 1 minute on the tight tissues in the back that are pulling the shoulder blade into the bad position.
2. Serratus punch: Perform this exercise to strengthen the serratus anterior, the muscle responsible for gliding the shoulder blade around the rib cage.

After this combination, the patient's upper trap pain was resolved because the movement root cause — not just the symptom — was addressed.

No — soft tissue work alone is not enough for lasting relief, according to Squat University. In the caption for this video, he specifically notes that soft tissue work "can be a helpful part of a comprehensive fix" but you then "need to work on the movement root cause to fix the issue for good."

In this case, the lacrosse ball work released the tight tissues, but it was the serratus punch strengthening exercise that corrected the actual mechanical fault — the shoulder blade's poor gliding pattern around the rib cage — and made the fix permanent rather than temporary.