Shoulder Pain, Simplified

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Purpose, Disclaimers
• 0:17 Shoulder Anatomy Made Simple
• 1:22 Gentle Exercise Sequence with a Dowel
• 3:08 Stretching to Restore Reach
• 5:36 Safety Reminders & Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Welcome back to the Hand to Shoulder Solution, Giving Pain the Middle Finger. I'm your host, Carl Petito. Thank you for hitting the like button and thank you for subscribing. Also, great thanks for your donations. It really helps me and my team bring you useful information. Today I want to talk to you about shoulder pain. There's a lot of reasons for shoulder pain, and you absolutely should be seen by a healthcare professional to adequately evaluate and diagnose the source of your pain. Today I want to talk about stiffness, tightness. And when we talk about the shoulder, it's very important to note the shoulder, socket and ball. The best analogy is a golf ball sitting on a golf tee. It's very shallow. And when you look at it here, the socket is part of the shoulder blade. But what holds the ball in the socket? Four main muscles, and that's called the rotator cuff, C U F F. When muscles get tight, they start pulling on their connective tissue, which are tendons. Tendons connect muscle to the bone, and things get in flame, get irritated. Sometimes it's very important to loosen the muscles. It's always important to loosen muscles that are tight and restore the normal mechanics of the whole shoulder complex. So today I want to go through first some very basic exercises followed by some stretching. But again, this should never replace being seen by your healthcare professional. Firstly, let's look at some repetitions that you can do for exercises. And a nice technique is to use a dowel rod. You just get any dowel rod. I usually have my patients, they can use a dowel rod or a golf club. And I have them start with the exercises that are typically the easiest to perform. And that starts with putting the golf club or the dowel, whatever you have behind your back, and raise your arms gently to the rear just until you feel it stretched. Hold it for one or two seconds at the end range. And I do about a dozen of those. And then to the front, nice wide stance, so you're stable, not going to lose your balance, nice wide grip. And then you're going to raise straight up to the front. The next one is horizontal pull to the rear. For this one, I like to go a little bit wider and bring it back. If you go too high, that's going to feel awkward. It might feel a little bit sore in the shoulder. So I like to go a little bit lower than the upper chest. You just bring it down to the lower chest area. Okay. The next exercise is again place the stick behind your back and bring it vertical. That motion helps with the ability to place your hand behind your back, which we'll talk about later. It's a very important stretch. In fact, we're going to dedicate a whole episode to that stretch. Now let's get into our stretches. The first stretch to lengthen tissue is to push the arm straight back. The stick or the golf club, whatever you have, should actually touch your hip, should slide right on your body, so that way the arm is being pushed straight back so that you're not coming out here, you're going straight back. You're going to hold that stretch for about 20 seconds and then relax. And again for 20 seconds. Okay. Another good stretch is with your back against the wall, or if you're lying on a bed, you can have your back flat on the surface, and then you're going to come out this way, and then the stick is going to assist you. And I change the angle of a sec as I come out. That stretch is very important for being able to put your hand behind your head to wash your hair and to reach back there. The next stretch, with your arm supported by the opposite hand and your elbows straight, you can walk up the wall as you get higher. Turn so your thumbs, some thumb side of your hand is pointed upward, and then slide right up the wall for a stretch for about 20 seconds. You can step back, give yourself a little bit of a rest break, and then slide up again. Transitioning from that to the next stretch, you would keep your feet exactly where they are, and then turn your feet. So now your arm is stretched up to your side. Now you can give yourself a rest break by just turning your trunk inward and then coming back out and feeling that stretch. Now, this is a different stretch, therefore, you might have to come away from the wall a little bit to ease up because those muscles are typically much tighter. Then you can turn again. After you do a few of those, reverse the whole thing, turn inward, face the wall, and then bring it down. What you don't want to do is after you do your transition and it's up to the side, you don't want to bring it down from there. Always turn in first and then bring it down. The last one is placing your hand behind your behind your back. The back of your hand should be against your body. So start by keeping your elbows straight, bring your hand behind your hip in line with your spine, and then start sliding your hand up your spine. You can use the opposite hand to assist it. We're going to talk about this specific stretch in more detail on the next episode. Thank you for watching. I hope that this was helpful information. Make sure that you're thoroughly evaluated by your healthcare practitioner. And thank you again for liking and subscribing to the channel.