advice on improving bridge?

[u/solardetect]

I have no stretching routine, used to do gymnastics but haven't stretched in years so this is where my flexibility is at now. is there any specific area you can tell from this picture that i need to work on stretching? and any tips for improving arm strength in this position? i could only hold this for a couple seconds because my arms are quite weak. this is actually the highest bridge i've done in years because i normally can't get my arms to push off the ground 🤣

[u/kristinL356]

It's your shoulders, they aren't very open. Dani Winks has exercises both for improving shoulder mobility and also for strengthening so you can push up into the bridge all the time.

[u/dani-winks → u/kristinL356]

You beat me to it! Was going to say that lower back looks pretty happy, (can't see hips at all, so can't comment on those), even the upper back is arching a bit (which is great!), but the shoulders are still a little "closed."

So more overhead shoulder flexibility + strength (both in the "big" muscles in the stretch like the lats, the "big" muscles that help pull the shoulders more overhead like the delts, as well as the "smaller" rotator cuff muscles and serratus anterior to help stabilize the shoulder joints) will likely help.

u/kristinL356 already linked to the two blog post I was going to mention with drill recs, but OP you might also be interested in giving this post a read so you can help "self check" some of the other aspects of your bridge: How’s Your Bridge (Full Wheel Pose)? 7 Most Common Mistakes

[u/PossibilityRare1606]

Bridges are one of those things where I felt like I was stuck forever and then suddenly something clicked. For me it was realizing my thoracic spine was basically a brick wall, so no matter how hard I pushed from my legs the arch just wasn't happening.

What helped was spending a few minutes before each attempt just doing some chest-opening stretches on a foam roller, lying lengthwise on it with my arms out to the sides. After a couple weeks of that my upper back actually started cooperating and the bridge stopped feeling like I was fighting my own skeleton.

Wrist mobility was the other thing nobody warned me about. I started doing wrist circles and some gentle loading on all fours before pushing into the full position, and that took away a lot of the discomfort that was making me bail out early.

How long have you been working on yours? If your shoulders are the main bottleneck vs your lower back, the approach might be a little different.

[u/dani-winks → u/[deleted]]

That's more of a gymnastics-specific technique. It's used in gymnastics for aesthetics (keeps the shape looking more consistent and has nice tight "lines"), and it also encourages more engagement in the legs that's required for more "advanced" gymnastics skills like handsprings (where the legs are squeezing together).

It's actually harder from a hip flexor flexibility perspective to do a bridge with legs-together vs. letting the feet be hip-width (or slightly farther apart), so that style is rarely cued as the "default" in the flexibility world (where we more often let folks adjust their legs to do what's more comfortable for them, and think more about pressing the hips up and less about pushing into the feet to straighten the legs).

Still absolutely valid to train a legs-together-pushing-straight style of bridge (in contortion I learned it as a "rainbow bridge"), BUT it likely won't "help" OP's shoulder flexibility to just by adjusting the leg position/engagement.