Shoulder Care Program

Know Your Joints

WELCOME TO OUR SHOLDER CARE PROGRAM. THESE SIMPLE MOTIONS, STRETCHES, AND EXERCISES GO A LONG WAY PROTECTING YOUR SHOULDER WHILE HELPING YOU PERFORM DAILY ACTIVITIES WITH VIGOR.

KEY POINT:

Good shoulder care requires daily gentle movements, stretches, and strengthening exercises as well as good posture habits while minimizing overhead stresses and poor movement patterns.

SHOULDER CARE 101

1. Do not abuse your shoulder: The first step is to good shoulder health is not to abuse your shoulder by doing physical work, exercise, or playing sports without good form, warming up, and just doing too much.

2. Ease into it: Ease into sports that require a lot of overhead motion like tennis and badminton and exercise like swimming.

3. Make sure you have good form: When working out with weights make sure you lift with good form especially when doing overhead lifts or other shoulder exercises. Furthering that point ask why you may be doing a shoulder exercise. You may find yourself not having a good reason why you are doing an exercise. See list below of acceptable exercises that you should consider. Also there are other shoulder exercise that are not good for your shoulder and should be avoided. Example: Behind the neck military press is a dangerous exercise. Upright rows and lateral raises which are common exercises are not great if you bring the weight higher than chest level. Make sure your form is great playing a sport or doing manual work as well.

4. Strengthen the stabilizing muscles: The other problem with working out is that you need develop all the muscles, especially the smaller stabilizing muscle of the rotator cuff and mid back, and not just the large muscles of the chest and arms. Please see exercise list below.

5. Maintain or seek good posture: We are always concerned about posture.

This is not just reserved to your neck and low back, but it affects all your joints including you shoulder. If you have rounded shoulders where you slouch, shoulder blades are winged, and if arms are internally rotated, you may be more likely to get shoulder pain. Please see our shoulder self tests to understand your posture. Improving posture through good habits and exercise goes a long way. Ask us about posture solutions.

6. Minimize overhead and repetitive arm movements: If you do a lot of overhead work in your job, use a computer a lot, and play overhead sports you may develop shoulder issues. Try to minimize overhead motion, forward arm work, and sports through graded exposure. In other words be conscious of how much you are doing and take frequent breaks. If you do overhead shoulder presses as a conditioning exercise use dumbbells with palms facing in to protect your shoudlers.

7. Condition your body for your sport and life: If you want to do overhead sports condition yourself for them. Example: If you are a swimmer make sure you are working on strengthening your rotator cuff and mid to lower trapezius muscles. If you do a lot of computer work make sure you practice good ergonomics (see neck care page).

8. Try to be conscious of what you are doing: Injuries can happen happen at any time, while playing sports, exercising, taking a fall, and during everyday activities such as reaching for something on a shelf or gardening so be in the moment.

9. Bend your elbows and use your legs when doing things overhead: Doing things overhead without bending the elbows or using your legs to lift the weight can also cause issues in the shoulder.

10. Make sure your body is conditioned to handle the stresses: Shoulder injuries happen in many sports especially if they require overhead motions and repeated or sudden movements of the shoulder. Again ask yourself if this sport is right for you and if your body is able to handle the sports stresses. The same holds true for occupational work at home or on the job.

11. Do healthy things for your Body: As with most health issue you need to rest enough to allow your body to heal and restore. As with other good habits eating a healthy, well balanced diet and drinking plenty of water can help everything work optimally. As with other joint issues, such as low back disorder, avoid smoking. Smoking affects circulation and can affect joint health

12. Move your shoulders: Besides strengthening and stretching I commonly recommend moving your shoulders throughout its range of motion through a variety of directions. The motion should be gentle, pain-free, and you should strive to have both sides feel the same. Examples: 1. bring arms from side to overhead with palms up and then with palms down 2. bring arms directly in front to overhead with palms down, facing each other, and facing up 3. bring arms from side and pull them back 4. make big circles with arms in clockwise and counterclockwise directions, etc.

13. Practice Hanging: Recent research suggests that it is beneficial to hang from a pull up bar or door frame. You do not have to do this with all your weight, your partial body weight is beneficial. Try to hold for 15 to 60 seconds or tolerance. According to Robert Kirsch's research, regularly hanging from a bar can help straighten out the curved acromion, which increases the gap in the subacromial space, which reduces the pinching and friction on the tendons that pass through that gap. Kirsch is quick to note that hanging isn't a panacea for all shoulder injuries. Partial hanging (with toes on ground) can also be helpful in decompressing the spine. See video. For more information see this page. See link for his research.

A Master Shoulder Care List that we use when working with many clients is listed below or see link. A great routine that most athletes and fitness enthusiasts should use is also listed to lower right or see link.