Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy

Episode 32 - Unfreezing the Narrative: Rethinking Frozen Shoulder

• Meghann • Episode 32

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Frozen shoulder has a reputation for being mysterious and stubborn, but what if I told you that the shoulder isn’t the problem at all..?

In this episode of Three Questions with Meghann Koppele Duffy, I dig into what makes frozen shoulder one of the most misunderstood conditions in movement and rehab. I unpack why the “idiopathic” label might be missing the point and how curiosity (not aggressive treatment) often leads to the biggest breakthroughs. You’ll also hear my own experience with frozen shoulder and what it taught me about the power of sensory awareness, connection, and critical thinking.

In This Episode You’ll Hear:

• Why frozen shoulder might be your brain’s protective response, not a mechanical failure

• How the feet, jaw, and spine can shape shoulder mobility

• The hidden influence of hormones, aging, and sensory mapping on recovery

Whether you teach movement, treat clients, or just want to better understand your body’s signals, this episode will help you “unfreeze” the story you’ve been told about frozen shoulder.

Links & Resources For This Episode:
Instagram Post about getting sensory feedback from your feet
Find a Neuro Studio Teacher Near You
Connect with me on Instagram
Connect with me on Threads

Meghann Koppele Duffy: Welcome to Three Questions where critical thinking is king, and my opinions and research are only here to support your learning and deeper understanding. Hey, I'm your host Meghann, and I'm so honored you clicked on Three Questions today so we can dig into frozen shoulder. Now, if you've never heard of frozen shoulder, well that's probably 'cause you've never worked with someone who had it or had it yourself, but it is something common we see, and it is something we commonly see in women after a certain age.

I'm not saying that men do not get frozen shoulder as well. But it's become, you know, this is my opinion, it's, I feel like it's becoming normalized for women. You know, in the same way, it's a little bit too normalized that for men after a certain age, they've gotta wake up to pee at least two or three times.

And while it might be common, why does it have to be normal? So let's dig into these three questions. Whether you've had frozen shoulder, you have it, or you work with humans, you're gonna come across it at some point, and maybe you'll think back to this episode and have some cool and innovative ideas. So enough lighthearted, chitchat.

Let's elevate, uh, small talk to medium and get to it. So, frozen shoulder, question one. Considering that most cases of frozen shoulder are idiopathic, idiopathic means no known cause. Okay. It's like my least favorite word and poorly understood. Now, this is not just my opinion, this is from doctors. This is from the literature.

Most cases of frozen shoulder are actually idiopathic, and there's a big lack of understanding. So how can we all stay curious and avoid being overconfident in our treatment plans? So to give you like a sub question to chew on is like. What questions can we ask our patients, friends or ourself to get a fuller picture?

So let's, let's break this question down a bit. So, how annoying, you know, you wake up with frozen shoulder and it sucks. How do I know? Well, I've experienced it. And no, despite the fact that I have wrinkles and make a lot of facial expressions, I'm only 43, so while I am in, uh, perimenopause, I'm kind of starting it now.

I have not gone through menopause yet, so I don't fall into that common category, but my experience was I went from having no shoulder pain to waking up one morning and not being able to move my left arm at all. Okay. Now, because I do this work and I understand neuro. I have a hypothesis what the cause was for me, but it's just that I have HPO hypothesis.

Easy for me to say. It's like a story I'm telling myself based off a lot of factors. So right now, maybe you haven't had frozen shoulder, but have you had a shoulder injury? So I want you right now to think about all the things that could contribute to your shoulder injury. Like maybe you fell as a kid, dislocated your shoulder.

Maybe you've been lifting heavy and you have a slight rotator cuff tear, but notice all the things you're thinking about are very shoulder related. Well, what about your feet? Huh? Feet. You say, Meghann? yes. What people love to forget is that the whole body's connected. So if you have poor sensory information from your feet, or lack of what I call foot to hip connection, that's going to affect your hip joints ability to stabilize and respond appropriately.

I, I've seen a new pathology of glute amnesia. Ugh, annoying. Now your glutes are fine. Your glutes aren't getting enough sensory input to activate. So, um, while people like to put names on things, that is a result of another problem. It is not a disease. There's a, there's nothing wrong with your glutes, they're just kind of deaf to whatever you're talking to them about, right?

So if that's the case one of our largest muscles, our lat, your latisimus dorsi. You might see that lat pull down at the gym. Okay? That's the only muscle, and I hate even this because like everything's fascially connected, but it really connects your lower body to your upper body. Kind of starts at the pelvis there, grabs your lower back.

The thoracolumbar fascia has a little bit of a spot on your shoulder blade where it attaches and then it inserts on your humerus. It's actually an internal rotator. So if the glutes aren't firing appropriately, it's gonna affect your lat. And man, if your lat is, um, I don't like to call efficient, I say ineffective if it can't express itself fully.

Okay. So our lat kind of, you know, pulls, think about the lat pull down when we're bringing our elbow towards our body. And part of me, if you're not watching me on YouTube, you can't see what I'm doing and internally rotates it. So if you're trying to do overhead movement and your lat can't fully express itself, I don't even wanna say lengthen or shore.

And I wanna say, if it can't fully express itself, that's almost like a mouse running on a, uh, wheelie thing and someone like putting another mouse, like putting a foot in front of it. Okay? You're gonna have to over recruit. You're gonna have to pull your humoral head out of centuries. You're gonna have to do weird ass shit to overcome that lat.

And you wanna know the secret, you cannot. Overcome, um, an inefficient, unhappy, um, uncurious lap. Okay. So yeah, your foot could be contributing to your frozen shoulder. In my case, I had to have a large part of my arm removed. I know that sounds dramatic. I had a big chunk of skin cancer on my left arm. Now that's not what caused the frozen shoulder.

She was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back for me. Okay, so I want you to stop putting blame on one thing. It wasn't 'cause you bent over or did something, or you did this, or you were lifting at the gym. Don't blame yourself. Blame the fact that you weren't adjusting to your sensory environment.

Maybe you're older now. Maybe you're still young, maybe you're going through puberty. We're gonna hit this question up later, but day to day, our body responds differently to sensory input. Right. Ever wear the same pair of jeans and like one day you're like hot to trot. Did I just say hot to trot? What am I 85?

Anyway, you're feeling good, right? You're feeling yourself. Everything looks good, everything's fitting good, ass looks good. Then you put them on like two days later and you feel like a stuffed sausage right now there's a lot of factors of why that happens, but same pair of pants. I'm sorry. You could not have gained that much weight in two or three days.

Okay. It's how our brain is responding to the sensory input of the pants. Okay. You also might be bloated, so there's more pressure. A lot of factors. So as a practitioner or as someone living with frozen shoulder, let's not look at one thing. I say this to my mentees all the time. When they ask questions in the q and a, I'm starting to feel like a dick, but they'll be giving me a problem and I'm like, cool.

But what about the rest of the body? So right now, I want everybody to ask yourself, how can we better support a frozen shoulder? Okay? Think of your frozen shoulder as your closest friend, right? That close friend that you see who's making some bad choices. She's picking the wrong man or woman. Um, she's a good person.

She just keeps making bad choices. Not terrible choices, but little bad choices that might, uh, bite her in the butt later. Okay? She hits a place where things get really bad. She's talking to you about it or he's talking to you about it. Do they, you, do you think they want you to point out all the things they've done wrong and you tell them how to fix all their problems?

Or do you think they just want you to listen

now? Right now you might be like, yeah, but she needs to know what she did wrong. Well, you are a prosecutor, not a good friend. How do I know that? Because I've been a prosecutor. Huh? I think of one of my closest friends from college. Diana, shout out to Diana. I remember one time getting mad at her. Diana might not know this, but Diana, if you're listening, you'll now know this.

I think what it was, also, shout out to mom. As you all know, I'm very close to my mom. Something they both do very well is listen. Um, they might be judging, but they're not like offering all this advice. And I think I remember it significantly. I was in a bad place and I was, we were in Florida, uh, visiting my parents and I was telling her what I was going through and she just sat there looking at me and I was like, does this bitch not give a shit?

Why is she not chiming in and telling me what I did wrong or supporting me or answering solutions? And I finally said something and she's like, huh? She's like, well, I'm just listening. And if I'm being honest, , if when I, when you talk, like sometimes if I just stay back and listen, you just talk in a circle and solve your own problem, it's kind of remarkable to watch, and that was such a huge lesson.

Is here I am thinking she's not engaged in the conversation and caring what I'm thinking about or talking about. Instead, she actually is so caring that she's gonna let me solve my own problems and not tell me everything I did wrong. Okay, so this is an example from my life, but it goes to this frozen shoulder is with our shoulder.

It's telling us all these little things that are wrong. Right, rather. And we kind of don't listen. So right now, and maybe, uh, this, this won't help your frozen shoulder. Maybe it'll help you be a better friend. Maybe you'll be a lot more like Diana. Um, think right now how can you better support your friend, your shoulder?

How can you listen to it? Well, sometimes my knee hurts, but it doesn't hurt all the time. And like sometimes my other shoulder blade hurts, but like, not all the time, sometimes I get headaches. Sometimes I have a hard time concentrating. All these things are factors into why our brain goes into a protective response, and yes, question two is if frozen shoulder is a protective response, which a lot of literature is pointing towards, it's a protective response, not a mechanical failure.

So how can we, going back to question one, ask better questions to get a fuller picture and better assess the nervous system to focus on more support. Okay, so I wanted to bring into question two to question one. We know some things. We know frozen shoulder is often idiopathic. Now I'm saying often not because I'm afraid to put it in with my whole chest.

But we don't know for a hundred percent that it's a hundred percent of the time idiopathic. So what I'm not gonna do is say something that I don't know is true, because then you're gonna be like frozen shoulders idiopathic. Then something comes up and then you'll look like an idiot. And I do not want you to look like an idiot.

Okay? At this point, how I treat frozen shoulder is that there is no one singular cause. I look at the factors and I look at it that the brain is protecting itself. And then we go back. So circling back to question one, I want you right now to think one question you can ask yourself or your clients to get a fuller picture.

What is one question that could really unlock some things? Think about it. Should you go big with nervous system? Should you go big about learning styles and their childhood? Should you ask them about their sleep? Okay. All these things matter. What's the client's biggest concern? They often wanna be out of pain, right?

So what I like to understand is how people are taking in sensory information. I ask them often about their diet, not because I wanna know about weight loss. Do they feel full often? Are they picky about their clothes? Are they specific about how they move? Do they have digestive disorders? Do they wear glasses?

Do they have trouble making eye contact? Do they have dental issues? Do they get headaches? Now, all of these questions are getting to the fact of how they integrate sensory information. Do they feel full? Okay. So I wanna know what their interceptions, like, what are, are they in tuned with their body? Are they too in tuned with their body?

And when I say too in tune with their body is sometimes those feelings are so big they overtake the actual sensory picture that's coming in. Why did I ask about their eyes? Well, can their eyes focus? Can their eyes gaze stabilize? Do they have a small visual field? Do they need glasses? Could their glasses be limiting their visual field?

Now, why does that matter guys? Well, if we can't, don't have a big visual field and we're wearing glasses that limit, we have to turn our head and neck a lot to see things to get the sensory picture. And when we move our head a lot, when we don't think we're moving our head, that might indicate some spinal instability.

And when our spine can stabilize, it's going to affect our shoulder movement. Why didn't I ask about dental issues? Well, if they're a tooth grinder, if their gums are receding, if their teeth shift around a lot, I know something's going on there. What's the shift? Why are they clenching their jaw? Why are they moving their jaw so much?

My jaw instability is one of the major factors to my shoulder. I remember teaching a class, this was shortly after I got frozen shoulder. I woke up one morning and couldn't lift my left arm. Now I didn't panic. I had to teach a lot of classes that day. So what I did was taught a class for full body integration.

We started foot to hip and we were working on sensory feedback distally to proximal.. So guess what? I in one Pilates, uh, I don't wanna call it Pilates, Pilates based movement class. Now I was teaching it so I was able to select the exercises, was able to take an arm that couldn't move at all and get it to move about 70%.

Now what's interesting was whenever I was exercising brain-based exercise, not just randomly exercising, when I was focused on what my right foot to hip was doing and my right shoulder girdle and spine, my left arm moved with zero pain. Zero, but without sensory awareness of my right arm and left leg, I couldn't move my arm without searing pain.

And I mean a pain so bad, I thought my arm was would've snapped off. Okay. Now I had an appointment with my, uh, do and I wanted him to look at it because I don't assume anything. I wanted someone to outwardly assess. He did some passive range of motion on my arm and I said, please stop. That really hurts.

And he's like, really? And I was like, yeah. I go, hold on, do that again. And I did a hip activation drill and my arm moved. So I knew right there, although I wanted a quick fix to my shoulder, I had to get back down to basics and take all the factors that led to this frozen shoulder and get my brain to stop protecting it.

Okay. Did I try, um, nerve glides? Did I try cranial nerve drills? Yes. The best of the best, and it helped for a moment because it wasn't a quick fix situation and frozen shoulder isn't. I had to admit to myself that I needed to do the hard work that I require all my clients to do, and I love that this happens to me.

It happens every five to six years. About five, about six or seven years ago, I had terrible vertigo. And I admit, I used to roll my eyes when people had vertigo. Oh, you're a little dizzy. I'm sorry. It effing sucks. Okay. So it was my learning experience. I love it gave me an opportunity to critically think and use our methodology, poked some holes in it.

And why I bring this up is it poked the biggest hole while I was teaching a class trying to get my students to move their whole shoulder girdle, like shoulder, blade, arm, everything. We had hands on our spine for feedback. Holy shit. My spine was moving so much when I moved my left arm. Now you would never know it was moving.

You could not tell by looking at me. I even recorded myself and I showed it to our level three teachers. I even showed it to a doctor I respect. I'm like, do you see any spinal funk there? They're like, no. I'm like, now feel it? And they're like, holy shit. Okay. Why I bring this to your attention guys? Stop assuming anything, assess, test, and if you wanna learn more about this, reach out.

We've got courses that do this. Remember, this podcast isn't about giving you answers to question. It's forgetting you to think. So if I'm telling you, I then did this with all our students at the neuro studio. I travel all around, so I was in Michigan, I was in California. I'm going to Toronto next week.

Every single person I test their spine moves when they move their arm. It's a huge problem in the Pilates community. Now, is the spine moving egregiously? No, but it's not stabilizing. Big problem. And the most common QIC is like in quadruped Push the floor away, activate your serratus. I'm gonna tell you something is gonna piss you off.

It pissed me off. It still pisses me off that cue. Everybody is mobilizing their spine, which is then in turn mobilizing their shoulder blade. It's not actually enough serratus. And if we want to really move our shoulder blades. We've got to get reflexes, stability in our spine. So if you're interested in more about this, come talk.

I'd love to chat. I'd love to hear your strategies because we've gotta figure this out as a community. It is a huge freaking problem. So think about this, if Meghann could not feel, and the top people that she respects could not see that she wasn't stabilizing her spine, what do you think about our patients who are maybe not as good movers or as not as aware?

Okay. Nobody's checking this. You guys are, be curious. Don't look for answers, look for problems, and then figure out, be like, holy shit. I remember in the class I yelled, I was like, holy crap guys. And what was interesting is I got my spine to stabilize and then in the next class. I did the same exercise.

Now on, um, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see that I'm kind of touching my C seven. It didn't work the next time. Why? Because our body compensates and luckily mine does. 'cause if it didn't, I would die. I was mobilizing my jaw shit ton. So I need to touch my jaw and my cervical spine to give my brain enough feedback so it doesn't move that instead of that, okay?

And this is why re brainin mapping is critical. That's why I say I can guarantee results with clients, not because I'm a fricking magician or using any like, groundbreaking shit. It's being able to assess and adjust it at the brain. It, it's, it's, it's pretty cool stuff. I wish I would've known it. I don't know.

You know what? I probably wouldn't have paid attention 15, 20 years ago when I first started. I don't know. Who knows? So going back to question one and two. How can we better support this shoulder? So I'm gonna challenge you guys next time you work with frozen shoulder. Don't touch someone's shoulder. Use the shoulder as the assessment.

Watch the range of motion change when you get their other quadrants and their spine to respond appropriately. Don't just spill out a little bit of, um, problems like if you like the threat bucket theory of the idea of decreasing threat, you know, with sleep and all that stuff. Great. But get the big guys, clear them up first.

Like the most mobile joint in the body. Your glenohumeral on the other side, your two hip joints. Let me tell you those three not being stable is creating a bigger problem than everybody knows. So start getting curious about this. Start noticing how your client's nervous system is reacting. Are they like more tense?

Are they relaxed? Are they breathing? If we have to force breath, that means the nervous system is not relaxed. What are their eyes are doing? What are their eyes doing? Okay, there's so many cool things. And now question three. So I know question one and two are a little similar, but I wanted two different nuances there.

Okay. Full picture and nervous system. Now how can we account for hormonal shifts that happen throughout a lifetime puberty. Childbearing years, perimenopause, menopause, and post menopause. Now, those all sounded like traditional female hormonal ships, but men go through puberty. Men have childbearing years.

They're, I guess, technically much longer than women, although there is some research pointing to problems with alt sperm. Okay. Men have hormonal shifts, some more than others. Testosterone is gonna be a factor. Men also have estrogen in their body. Okay. My dad is gonna hate that I say this. Um, I'm not going to say it.

My dad has had multiple cancers. And one was estrogen related and my dad was very confused and I had to explain to my dad that men have estrogen. That's normal. That's not abnormal. Okay? So I think a lot of men might not know that they have hormonal fluctuations, not as aggressive as women, but there are gonna be hormonal shifts and what happens with hormonal shifts.

Okay? I'm not even talking about sex drive and stuff like that. I'm talking about sensation. Dealing with pain skin. Remember, our skin is our largest sensory organ. Does our skin get more taut and responsive as we age? Or the opposite? What about our muscles? Yes, you can still build muscles into your eighties and nineties, but if we don't adjust to the sensory feedback our body is getting through our feet, through our hands, through our skin.

That's in my opinion why a lot of people have trouble building muscles. Yes, there's hormones, but we aren't specific about the sensory changes throughout a lifetime. Okay. When I work with young athletes, I am adamant about not giving a ton of proprioceptive cues. Their bodies are changing. Don't lock them into something that's going to change.

Working on systems like their visual and vestibular, let their proprioception follow higher auter systems. Okay. We make a lot of assumptions about kids. In my opinion, a lot of the sports specific training and the specializing too soon is actually a, is is going to affect their life throughout a lifetime.

How their body adjusts to sensory input and how their body moves. So what I love and what I've allowed my body to do is have unique sensory experiences. I don't lift three times a week. I vary my workouts, I lift heavy. I sometimes lift with no weight or lightweight because I wanna make sure no matter what I'm doing, my brain and body can respond.

And let me tell you, that was my biggest issues. I wasn't a great athlete. I wasn't really coordinated.. I was this surprised people, but maybe it doesn't surprise people. But I was the captain of the cheerleading squad. I was a decent enough dancer. But I don't, I don't identify as a dancer. 'cause I was good at cheerleading, which was like very like sharp movements.

The smoothness in movement. That wasn't my skillset, right? So I could always follow choreography. I was always a good enough in a sport to make the team, but I wasn't a starter or a good player. Why? Because I couldn't respond to sensory input. My body hurt a lot. I've told this story. I remember like stretching and like practice and I'd be like, oh, my back hurts.

And like coaches would be like, what are you, 85? And I'm like, no, my back hurts when I do this hip stretch. And they were like, I don't know, do something else. Okay. I was good at softball, but I wasn't consistent. One of my coaches, Mr. Ranieri, used to be like, we need to give Meghann a bushel basket to catch sometimes.

Well, I have eye tracking issues, so sometimes my eyes can't converge on a ball. I realized as an adult playing tennis, I asked a tennis pro, so like, do you see the ball when you hit it? And he was like, excuse me. And I was like, do you like actually see the ball when you hit it? And everybody says something different.

Someone's like, yes. Other people go, well, I don't actually look at the ball. I see it in my peripheral vision because I'm looking at this. Everybody has different strategies, but what I realized is I don't really see the ball when I play tennis. And I was. I was like, okay, but I'm better now because I didn't actually see the ball.

Golf. We went to top golf for my birthday with my nieces and nephew. I kept totally missing the golf ball and I made Brian video me. I shut my eyes every time I was going for impact. So it's kind of hard to hit a golf ball when you are not looking at it. Right, so I'm sharing this because we're all so unique and maybe you suck at sports because sensory input.

One of my favorite students at our intensive, he was a dance, well, he still is a dancer. He was like, I was terrible at ball sports. So I picked him and I was throwing a tennis ball at him and he could not catch. And of course I made a joke and we laughed, but I said, hold on a sec. With one eye exercise plus proprioceptive cue.

I threw the tennis ball at him and he was catching it like he was a professional athlete. And I said to him, you are not bad at sports. Your eyes just couldn't focus on the ball. So think about how many kids think they're uncoordinated or bad at sports. There's some underlying things. What about kids who can't pay attention in class?

Why am I talking about kids when we're talking about frozen shoulders? 'cause you were all kids. What was your bugaboo as a kid? What did you always get yelled at for? I mean, now I know my daddy used to always tell me to look alive when I was playing softball because my eyes weren't focused. I didn't look focused right Now, if I would've understood it back then maybe I could've worked on it.

I probably wouldn't have. Okay, now let's go into later years. Childbearing ears, menopause. Our skin, our tissue, our body changes again. So why are we so shocked that it's very common women in menopause and post menopause when proprioception has the biggest change for women? Why are we that surprised that people are getting frozen shoulder?

Now, think about all the stupid shit you've done with a body throughout a lifetime. Many women, not all women. I haven't and will not many women will have children. Maybe it's vaginal, maybe it's C-section. I don't know. That affects your proprioception. That was pretty traumatic. Childbirth does not get the respect it deserves.

So inability and just doing kegels and exercises for pelvic floor specifically, I think jams women up worse sometimes. I had a pelvic floor therapist, one of the best. In quote, tell me that a client's scoliosis didn't matter in relation to her pelvic floor issues. Yeah, it does. When you have scoliosis, your spine is a harder time to stabilize.

It's gonna affect your breathing, your pelvic position. What about the writing reflex? All these things matter, right? So all this lifetime of proprioceptive stuff, injuries, maybe glasses, maybe you had had concussions, maybe you've had other major injuries, all those are piling up. And then when you have a big proprioceptive change, your body's gonna shut shit down.

We cannot have mobility without enough stability. Okay, so if we go back through all my history, all my sprained ankles, my sacral fracture, I've had issues with my right SI joint for years after my sacral fracture. Okay? My right side is a bit of a problem, both hand in arm. Think about driving, think about all the things we do with our right side, although they're more mobile, the brain mapping is not as good and they don't stabilize as well.

My left arm when I had a major proprioceptive shift of a piece of my deltoid and a big chunk of my arm removed, well, my brain was like, shut shit down. The her spine is not stabilizing. When this arm moves, that's gonna cause a problem. Her right arm isn't her left leg. Her right leg is not. My brain shuts shit down.

I have complete full range of motion on my left arm. I can now do pushups again, pain-free, all this stuff. But let me tell you, if my right side isn't online, I get pain in my left shoulder. I actually posted on my Instagram, I don't know when you'll watch this, but I did like a Pilates exercise called um, uh, T pulls, or some people call it pulling straps too, and I demo it and without sensory input from my right foot, it can hurt.

Like bad. So I showed three ways to get sensory feedback from your feet. Hey, um, um, maybe I'll have Joe put in the show notes. Maybe you can like link it to that Instagram post just so you can kind of see some options here. Right. I'm throwing a lot at you guys today for frozen shoulder. So if you were looking for solutions, I just added 20 more things you have to figure out.

So, to summarize and put a bow around this episode, I had two pages of research.

So there is research that supports that frozen shoulders I idiopathic and poorly understood, but honestly that kind of sounds like we're using re, like we're reducing it. Reductionism. That. It's like that simple. It's super complex. So I don't want you to be like, well, there's no known cause of frozen shoulder, so I'm just gonna throw shit against the wall.

No, we need to be organized. People want results. Okay, so I want you to think, number one, what questions can you ask to get to the root of the problem? What was their first injury? Because we know that's gonna be proprioceptively, the shittiest spot. How does their body take in sensory information? Is their spine actually stabilizing when they move their arm?

Do you actually know what that means or feels like? And if the answer is no, reach out. Let's talk about it. Okay? Because we what? We don't know. We don't know. That's okay. That doesn't make you a bad teacher to me. Anybody asking that question is actually amazing. Teacher, because we're willing to. Figure out what the hell.

We don't know. We don't know. I had no idea my spine was moving that much. At first, I was a little embarrassed and at first I was a little embarrassed. I got frozen shoulder, but fuck that. I'm allowed to get injuries. Now here's the difference. If I get an injury and it doesn't clear up, well, then that's a problem.

I practice what I preach. I stand by everything I say. I do it on my own body, and when that shit doesn't work, that's where I poke Swiss cheese. We make changes. There's way more that I don't know. Which leads me to number two, it's a protective strategy, but there's also research saying that a, me taking a mechanical approach to frozen shoulder can also work because I bet the people using a mechanical um, strategy, those are people who are intuitive and low know how to look at the rest of the body.

And they probably do it so intuitively they don't know they're doing it right. So there's some variables there. And number three, hormonal shifts. We all know we have hormonal shifts and the problem is guys hormonal shifts. Everybody responds differently to them, so we don't really know. But what we do know about frozen shoulder is it's complex.

We should never force range of motion. If you are feeling a stretch or a discomfort, that is an output, that is your brain telling you to stop. What the hell you're doing? Don't believe me. Go into that stretch, do some of my activation drills or some sensory input changes on your other limbs and spine, and watch the range of motion in your arm change.

Don't say it doesn't work until you try it, and if you're having trouble, reach out, hook you up. We gotta figure this out together because so many people are struggling with frozen shoulder. All right. Don't you point at one thing? Don't you point at hormonal and say, Meghann told you, don't you point at just the opposite ankle?

It's complex. The brain is protecting it, and I think together with our clients, our patients, ourselves, our body, the biggest question we can ask ourselves is, what are you trying to tell me with this pain? Stop thinking that pain is an input. Pain is an output. Pain is indication. Your brain, no, like what you're doing.

And for me, telling people to stop doing that is not a solution. But giving people's brain another option and making that more efficient is really where the magic happens. So I hope today has scratched your brain, and hopefully you'll be thinking about frozen shoulder differently. And if you have any further questions, please let me know.

I'd love to hear your experience and what's worked at and what didn't, and I want you to think of the things that worked. Don't look at the thing. Think of what that thing did. What did that thing achieve? Oh, this hip exercise cures frozen shoulder. Why will it activate in my hip? It helped my brain.

Proprio set my hip so it could stabilize. Think the wise and if you think the wise, this shit will never get boring, and you can wake up every day excited to help your clients or yourselves. All right guys. That's it for today. I'll see you next time. Hope your shoulders stay unfrozen.. 

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