Your upper back is the area covering your shoulder blades and the part of your spine between them and extends down to the bottom of your rib cage. Like your lower back it is also posture sensitive. Because your upper back is nervously connected to your lungs the condition of your upper back  effects the way you breath and the way you breath effects your upper back. Your upper back also contains the ganglions of your parasympathetic nervous system, that part of your nervous system that responds to sudden stress, the muscles in your upper back respond very quickly to the fight and flight response. When your stress hormones are over-active the muscles in your upper back can get very uncomfortable.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) your upper back is thought to have a particular affinity with the emotions of anxiety and grief, grief in TCM is related to your lungs (and skin) and anxiety is related to your heart. According to TCM philosophy the muscles of your upper back react to these strong emotions.

Stressed out people may feel tight all over but particularly so in their upper backs, when the muscles of the upper back are tight their shoulders look like they are too high (when they calm down the shoulders sit in a lower position). In bio-energetics this stress driven stiffening is termed muscular armouring, even though the reason we feel stressed might not have anything to do with feeling physically threatened it is kind of hard wired in us that the body goes into a self protective mode as part of the fight and flight response.

Asthmatics will often have a tight upper back with their shoulders in a raised position too, this is why they tend to breathe in a shallow way. Test it for yourself, stand infront of a mirror, make yourself breath shallowly for a few minutes and then make yourself breathe more deeply and slowly for a while and see how it effects your posture and your mood. The Buteyko  method of breathing is a therapy from Russia that makes people breath more deeply and has helped alot of asthmatics control their breathing and be less dependant on medication by using this principle.

Smokers are a group of people with tight upper backs and people who wish to quit smoking usually find it alot easier to do when they get regular massage to their upper back.

Women have a tendency to breathe more shallowly (costally) than men, men tend to have a natural tendency to breath more deeply (diaphragmatically), this is one of the reasons why women will often have more acute reactions to stress than men do….and probably need more upper back massages than men do because of it.

Finally it needs to be mentioned that men and women both use the muscles in the front of their upper body more than the muscles at the back of their upper body going about their normal daily activities, so it is a good practise to regularly (3x weekly minimum) stretch the muscles of your chest and the front of your shoulders and strengthen the muscles in your upper backs like you would when you use a rowing machine.