I am very tall and I have so called shoemaker’s chest. As I was reading it is not very serious defect but there is 1 cm difference between one side of the chest and the other. What should I do with it because I have been training for a couple of years and the chest grows and the difference does not disappear.

Koilosternia colloquially referred to as shoemaker’s chest develops because of the disorder of diaphragm development and chest cartilages – most often diagnosed in people who grew fast. In case of this disorder the most common reason of its development is: weakening of the back muscles, moving shoulders to the front, and weakening of the abdominal muscles. You did not write what you’d been training.

If this is gym training, then:

You should include in your training plan the appropriate proportions of the back muscles, bearing in mind that they are less reactive than chest muscles, so the standard proportion: 1 to 1 is not appropriate (I mean deep muscles with red muscle fibre dominance). You should verify the exercises you do as: if your chest muscles were strengthened on the approximate attachment then they will pull your shoulders to the front and at the same time inhibit correction of the postural defect. You should definitely strengthen romboideus muscle on shortened attachments. Additionally, some other exercises which cannot be described just in a nut shell.

If you are doing some other sports – you play basketball or volleyball or you go swimming then the motoric base programme should be designed due to the facilities you have available e.g. swimming pool, gym, possibilities of doing some exercises at home. The programme should, apart from developing focused motoric parameters, also influence the correction of the chest defect. In endurance sports – correction of this defect is very important as it decreases the breathing capacity which affects your endurance potential.

To sum up, we can obviously design a programme for you, be it body building or developing motoric base for the sport discipline you do which will take your defect into consideration and focus on correcting it.

Orma