Prone Lift-Off Hold Time

How to read this

Capacity, measured face down

The shoulder girdle has two jobs and this screen tests the second one. The first is to let the arm move; the second is to hold the position of the blade against gravity while the arm does something else. A forward carriage is usually described as a position, but it is just as often a capacity problem: the muscles that would hold the blade back are not being used, so the blade drifts.

Testing that face down removes the arm from the equation. You are not asked to hold a weight, only to hold a position, and the timer records how long the position survives.

Procedure

Lie face down with a small pillow under the forehead so the neck is not twisted, arms relaxed at the sides, palms up. Draw both shoulder blades gently toward the spine and slightly toward the ceiling — a small movement, not a squeeze.

Start the clock. Breathe normally and watch three things: whether the head starts to press into the pillow, whether the lower back arches, and whether the blades slowly drop. Stop at the first of those that happens.

Reading it

Fifteen seconds or more with the neck quiet is a working hold. Between six and fifteen seconds, or a hold where the neck visibly joins in, is the substitution pattern: the position is achieved but not held by the muscles meant to hold it.

Under six seconds, or a hold accompanied by pain at the front of the shoulder, is the point to stop. Pain during scapular retraction usually means the shoulder is being asked to move through a range it does not have, which is a different problem from a capacity one.

Using the number

This is a capacity reading, so it changes with use — but only slowly, and only if the daily position stops fighting it. Record it, change the desk, and re-measure in four weeks. A number that improves while the wall contact screen stays the same tells you the muscle got better and the posture did not, which is useful to know and easy to miss if only one screen is being tracked.