SaveYourself.ca helps you solve pain problems

published 6/23/04, updated 5/02/06

Massage Therapy for Your Pectorals

Perfect Spot No. 9, in the pectoralis major muscle of the chest

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada (qualifications)

Trigger points (muscle knots) are the world’s most common cause of aches and pains. The Perfect Spots series of articles teaches you how to self massage the most satisfying and therapeutically significant places on the human body to apply pressure. Each Perfect Spot article focuses on a specific location. For a complete, advanced tutorial that walks you through every possible self-treatment option for muscle pain, see Save Yourself from Trigger Points & Myofascial Pain Syndrome!

The “pecs” are popular muscles. Of the 700+ muscles1 in the human body, pectoralis major is one of the dozen or so that most people can name and point to. It also harbours one of the most inevitable and significant — yet little known — trigger points in the human body.

Pectoralis major covers the entire top half of your chest. It is mostly an arm mover, although it also stabilizes the joint between your sternum and collar bone. Specifically, it is the hugging muscle: it powerfully pulls and rotates the arms towards the center of your body. Like all the big flexors, it’s incredibly strong. The pectoralis major is so large, spreading out like a fan across the entire chest, that no matter what position the shoulder is in, the pectoralis major can do its job with at least some of its fibers.

(Pectoralis minor, by the way, is quite a different muscle. As its name suggest, it is much smaller. It is completely covered by the pectoralis major, and does not move the arm at all!)

The pectoralis major is also, interestingly, one of the only muscles in the human body that is almost always much larger in men than it is in women, which accounts for much of the difference in upper body strength between the genders. I’ve massaged thousands of people, and even the strongest women usually have relatively thin pectoralis major muscles. Regardless, Perfect Spot No. 9 is a good massage location for both men and women.

No. 9 is easy to find by feel, because it is on the edge of a distinctive pocket or hollow directly underneath your collarbone. The pocket is a small, umuscled space between the deltoid and the pectoralis major. If you explore right below your collarbone, it is easy to find the soft spot between these two large muscles. Once you’ve found it, press towards the sternum against the edge of the hollow — that’s pectoralis major you’re pressing — and you’ve found Perfect Spot No. 9.

Thumb pressure is often adequate to stimulate this spot, but many people — especially men, with their larger pectorals — may need knuckles or even an elbow to get a clear signal.

Pressure on Spot No. 9 tends to relieve that uncomfortable sense of constriction and stagnancy in the chest.

This spot feels good because the pectoralis major is partly responsible for the common problem of a collapsed chest, the shoulders rolled forward and inward. Almost everyone feels tight in the chest because of this, particularly people who work with computers routinely. Pressure on Spot No. 9 tends to relieve that uncomfortable sense of constriction and stagnancy in the chest, creating a sense of having more space to breathe in, which is quite pleasant.

Although No. 9 is a specific spot on the edge of the pectoralis major, it’s also quite effective to use the big knuckles to massage the entire space underneath the clavicle. You would need some oil or lotion for this, of course, and it’s best to glide towards the centre, catching Spot No. 9 along the way.

Bonus pectoralis major tip

A lot of men would like to have better developed pectoralis major muscles for aesthetic reasons, because “huge pecs” are pretty much definitive of a masculine appearance. Unfortunately, few men understand which exercises will achieve this effect! The confusion arises from the fact that the bottom half of the pectoralis major has some different function than the top half. To define the pectoralis major, you primarily need to exercise the bottom half of the muscle. While all pectoralis major fibres adduct and internally rotate the shoulder, only the lower fibres extend the shoulder. Therefore, the best pectoralis major training include some resistance to shoulder extension. Those exercises are:

Note that standard wide-position push ups are a good general pectoralis major exercise, but do not isolate any part of the pectoralis major.


Further Reading

All The Perfect Spots for Trigger Point Massage

Choose your perfect spot!

Or, for general information and advanced tips about trigger point therapy, see Save Yourself from Trigger Points!

and …


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Are trigger points too good to be true?

Trigger point therapy often fails, but it often succeeds. Trigger points are not a “flaky” diagnosis. They are based on a lot of hard science. You can take photomicrographs of them, measure their electrical activity, take samples of their acidic and toxic tissue chemistry.

In addition to a decade of my own clinical experience, the Perfect Spots are based primarily on the research and writing of Drs. Janet Travell and David Simons, the pioneers of myofascial pain syndrome research. Dr. Travell died in 1997 after decades of tireless efforts to educate her medical colleagues about trigger points. Dr. Simons continues to publish. They produced “the Big Red Books,” a massive 2-volume text about trigger points, and recently Dr. Simons published Muscle Pain with Dr. Siegfried Mense.

The existence and importance of trigger points is not scientifically controversial, but it is obscure. The challenge is to get the word out. Doctors are generally uninformed about musculoskeletal health care — it simply isn’t on their radar. As Dr. Simons wrote, “Muscle is an orphan organ. No medical speciality claims it.

Notes

  1. See How Many Muscles? Return to text.
  2. Signorile et al. Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 2002. Return to text.