Top Shoulder Pain Exercises |How to Train Away Shoulder Pain
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Hey, what’s up coaches and athletes Michael Hughes here with Gymnazo Edu another installment on the Tweakology series. This one is all about the big boys upstairs the shoulders, he’s powerhouses that make the upper body just dance and look so good as we move through throughout the day. And this one’s going to be a video talking about the major anatomy, what’s going on what’s what’s making these guys shine, and then also the common exercises that we run into as trainers of movement, and what dysfunctions can come up with that and of course, how to modify how to tweak, not just changing the action, but changing the what we think the nine other variables that come with an action and how you can be as successful as you possibly can be, as a trainer in this industry. Now, I have said this a lot, but it’s a big deal, I want to put a focus on it again, that there is a big change happening in the movement industry. And it’s been fueled by knowledge, and how that knowledge that has been used and held by those people way above us as we see it in the industry, by the license and by the graduate people that have this knowledge. But it’s been applied inappropriately, it hasn’t been played completely in its application. So as a Gymnazo Edu staff, it is our goal to share this knowledge and therefore enable a greater capability to those individuals who have the most power to change the industry and give the athletes and clients of this world a greater potential. And once our as trainers know that knowledge, which is about more about the how and the why the human body functions the way it does, not just from textbooks or traditional education, but from the multitude of methodologies that are rooted in the principles of physics, biology and Behavioral Sciences, or what we call the applied functional sciences. Once we have this knowledge, then we start to fill the gap that persists in the greater healthcare system. So let this educational video be just a little bit of a drop of understanding on how to think about human movement in the training and conditioning environment. And how we trainers once we are well educated and think about applying principles first, then we could vastly improve our capacity and our capability to train a condition every athlete and client who comes into our facilities, and who have the amazing opportunity for us to serve. So if you liked this thought process, then hit that like button. If you want to start to join this thought process will you can start by hitting the subscribe button. But then you can also apply to our MDMC mentorship. And check out for more information in the link in the description below. So let’s get to this. What is the anatomy of the shoulder? What are the major players? When we’re talking about the bony tissue? You got to think about this humerus, right? No question about it. We got to think about the scapula and of course the big players of the thoracic spine, even the cervical spine. But we can’t forget about the clavicle because it really is the only structural component that attaches this crazy little thing to our major superstructure to the thoracic and cervical spine. So we can’t forget about that player right there. What about the muscles in the connective tissues? Well, there’s a lot of them. So a lot going on here. Biceps, triceps, right or pec major and pec minor. pec minor is a big player, big player the massive traps that are behind us. What about the rhomboids that that kind of pull our shoulder blades back home? What about the last huge influence are huge and influencer into the shoulder? And of course, the rotator cuff. They’re small, but they’re powerful. The subscapularis, the teres minor, the infraspinatus and the supraspinous. You know, it’s can’t forget about those guys, but I think we put too much emphasis on the rotator cuff. Too much isolation is played there, and not enough integration. We’ll talk about that in a bit. What about the biomechanics of the shoulder? Well, this shoulder this glenohumeral joint is designed to be a mobile player, I can do so much motion the kind of like how the hip joint has play in massive flexion and extension, lateral and cool call this kind of abduction and AB reduction motion, horizontal a deduction and horizontal a reduction or rotation across the body. It’s a huge player and when you have a huge player that can do so much. It needs a stable friend, it needs someone to control that massive motion. And that is this is a scapula that’s your shoulder blade. And this is where a big inflammation miss is happening. When there’s problem with this shoulder joint itself. You have to go to its controller, which is the scapula which is the shoulder blade is that scapula providing the necessary pre movement is it positioning itself so the shoulder can be free. And if it’s if it is, then you got to look at the even bigger player that’s next door and that’s a thoracic spine and is that thoracic spine allowing to have lateral flexion rotation to set up the scapula to set up the glenohumeral joint or the humerus and the elbow and the wrist to play its role. So there’s a lot going on with shoulder pain. And it’s so little about the shoulder itself. If I can have you take one thing away from this, it is do not focus on the shoulder, but focus on the players influence the shoulder. More importantly, because there’s a lot of dysfunctions that happen at the shoulder joint. Yes, the rotator cuff is a big player gets a lot of press, you know, you can have some subluxations, or some dislocations of that rotator cuff. So but shoulder impingement success, especially with vertical motion, but generally just have shoulder pain and discomfort, right, just kind of bucket all together, just it just bothers me right here, right there. When I do this, I’m going to do that frozen shoulders kind of same kind of thing. It’s just getting too much too much action through it. And more than likely the scapula in the thoracic spine aren’t playing their role. So let’s go into the, into the training and conditioning, right. So what exercises typically come up that we modify for tweak for and how you can think about them, hopefully differently. And wow, or enable your clients to train more with less dysfunction. Well, can’t, can’t not start, we’ve got to start rather, with with a big old fashioned pull up, chin up, right, the most well understood the most overplayed upper body drill that mankind has ever seen. Listen, the modern time is the pull up. Now, I don’t wanna say stop doing pull ups. There’s no question about that. Keep doing them. But we got to think about, are there other things that we can do before we do a weighted bodyweight pull up? Right, that’s, that’s a big drill. That’s a big massive drill that a lot of us just do way too soon. Before we are ready to do that. So if you have to do it, then have some resistance bands have those big monster bands hanging from that bar, put your foot into them, put your knee into them have the extra bounce the effect to come up top. So you can get 10 20 reps in, you can feel what it’s like to go through that motion pattern with a little bit of stress versus your whole body weight. Because that’s just a lot food, this joint that doesn’t have a lot of overhead play in our in our, in our modern day life. We’re not overhead a whole lot. So we’re very tight through this lateral kind of, we’ll just call it the latter ribcage to keep it simple. And it’s already resisting it has a pull down effect even before we reach up. So add some resistance bands or start with a with a with a cable pull down with a rubber band pull
down verses through that motion. Also, think about mixing your grip, it doesn’t have to be a pull up throwing a chin up, that’s less stresses because the shoulders are in tighter. When we do that, there’s less as we open up more we require more elasticity through our pec minor expecially. And our pec major as we open up here. So as we get into that range, and we open up the scapula has to throw itself backwards more to do that. And if that pec minor is bound down to that pet pack meters overly trained to push, it’s going to be much more stressful start with a chin up, it’s going to be a much greater range of success if you do that. And then I want to throw this one in here, grabbing on to a stick of smoke stick or, or any sort of stick. And think about doing active tension drills. That is by taking on a stick and taking the stick and literally pushing it together, pushing it together. And raising up up up up up up, up up up, that stick now weighs 50 pounds, it feels like then take that stick and pull it apart, pull it apart, pull it apart, pull apart, you’re getting a lot of muscle cortical activation through the appropriate muscle groups, just by providing some isometric or what you call muscle active tension through a range of motion and start to feel what it’s like for those muscles to say, Oh, those are the muscles that I should be working on those muscles that are really kind of being the polar in the pusher of a pull up motion and your body never left the ground. I wish I knew about that concept 10 years ago would have saved a lot a lot of T Rex arms. In my day from class, we just couldn’t bend their arms because of so many pull ups that we threw into a program because just we didn’t know better. So that’s my first tweak, like Thrasher. What about the pushup another kind of staple in movement and in fitness, that I think it’s overplayed. And we do it to a degree too soon, much too soon, or much more often. So what we’d like to think about is when you do a hand position, push up and I like to do push ups from my fingertips strengthens my fingers and soft tissue work. But we tend to go just like our shoulder width, right? We think about okay, we want to keep our hands over a chest or over our nose or in cases. What’s the ideal push up position should our elbows be out or in? Honestly, we like it all but all depends on your client tell and where to start. So here’s a gentle way to think about Here’s six different ways to do a push up that put different stressors to the shoulder joint. And you’ve seen me do it before, if you’ve watched this, this series, put one hand in front of the other, put the other hand in front of the other, I have this shoulder and much more of an extension position this shoulder much more in the flexion position with my one shoulder hurts a little bit more, I can offset the forces by pre positioning the body. And I can do a push up, that maybe relieves stress through that shoulder. If that if that doesn’t work through the sagittal plane, you can also go through the funnel plan, I’m gonna go more wide, do a push up, maybe, maybe more narrow is going to be a better way to do a push up. And then don’t roll out positioning our fingers to go open. Or to go closed. And our positioning, right, by opening up, you’re going to you’re going to shut down the posterior shoulder, you’re gonna give it more, you’re gonna give it more slack. By going by fingering in, you’re gonna shut down the anterior part of the shoulder and give it more slack to go through a greater range of motion with less stress. So just ways to think about the physics of what our shoulder goes through in a push up. Yes, the elbows were going to go different places, we do not believe that as a bad thing. It certainly can’t be bad for someone who doesn’t manage push ups very well. But it’s understanding the why behind it, not just the what. And here’s a big one that I had, I didn’t want to start with it. But I have to go with it, it’s doing a push up from your knees. It’s not a bad thing at all. Don’t think it’s weak. Don’t think it’s small sauce, you know, doing a push up from your knees is where most of us should start. Remember, we want to start with success. We don’t want to beat up our connective tissue in our first workout back. What’s that going to do, it’s going to be going to delay the next workout. Working, it’s about consistency, more than anything else. Consistency is king and queen. So kneeling is no big deal or going to an elevated surface, or even an elevated surface and kneeling. Right. If you don’t have time to work out, you got to do push ups for one minute, save yourself a lot of pain, save yourself a lot of pain and progress your way through it. But of course you do that push up on the toes, as well. And getting into that spot. Now those are pretty simple ones, right? What about changing your body position as you go through a push up. So as you push and pull the view, the thoracic spine plays a big part in that. And typically, if we just go straight up and down, our spine doesn’t get much opportunity to help out. So what if we put in some lateral flexion into a push up or what we call coiling, I’ll show from the side, if I can get into a coil position, I get that latissimus dorsi right there to to really engage. And when it when it really engages my opposite side, which you didn’t see, I’ll show that again, my opposite really lengthens. And when a muscle begins to go through lengthening, it acts like a rubber band it wants to shorten it wants to provide that kickback power. So if I go into lateral flexion, I only get I also get my core, my lateral ribcage, my thoracic spine to help me rebound and come back out of that spot has more complicated has more complexity to it. But we’re getting we have 800 plus different muscles that’s used them to help our body expand its capacity of movement. And a push up is not one that needs to be out of that thought process. So I like that one a lot. Now the next one I want to go into is a plank. And I spoke about in our in our lower back series. But a plank is another part where Steve said gosh, I just can’t do my planks. My shoulders are burning, they’re on fire, or just hurts to be in a position. So I’m not a firm believer in a static plank hold doesn’t really teach the body much because we don’t really train statically we’d like to train dynamically. We are too static and in our lives. And I like to think our training condition needs to fulfill the other missed opportunities in our movement life. So we’d like to do dynamic planks. What that looks like I’ll go from a box here significant very obvious for you is maybe we can do a plank. And if we hold it neutral, our shoulders don’t like that. But what if we slide our pelvis to the left and Hold that plank or slide a pelvis to the right and Hold that plank if you’re going to do static planks, maybe you can rotate one way and rotate the opposite way. Maybe even go into a more of a up kind of a flexed hip position or honestly it’s not a bad thing to go into more of a hip extended as so so long as the thoracic spine and pelvis have that capacity. But pre positioning your pelvis changes the stresses through the shoulders just like changing your hand positions changes this dress through the shoulders as well. One is just bottom up the other which is more kind of top down. So ways to think about that one and also we can also use that same thought process of our hands shins in a push up in a plank, but I can even go from an elbow position, right, I can put my right elbow, or my right forearm further up and my left elbow back, that changes the stress through my shoulders, I can do the opposite, I can go more wide, I can go more narrow, I can fly the elbows out, I can even fly the elbows in and the hands out. Remember, physics is the dictator of how the biomechanics of the body works. So it’s important that you can understand the options. So as an engineer of movement, you know how to play it to make it work for the moment in front of you. So your client is successful. It’s all about making sure you can hit the next workout can happen if you can’t fix a problem, and at least continue to train them as close as possible as you can. Because like I said, consistency is King good motion produces better motion. While worse, painful motion only produces more painful motion, this is the way that we see it. What about shoulders with presses,
I covered this in the in the lower back portion, but it fits very well with the shoulders, when you do a press or use a viper. When you do a press right, you’re fixed on a double grip hand or a bilateral hand, you press you kind of half one hand has to kind of follow the other hand, but you can change the angulation of your press. So now one shoulder goes through way more adduction, no one goes through much more a reduction. And that plays into a shoulder press, that may be straight overhead, it gets to impinged, well, maybe you can change it up a little bit by just changing where your body goes. And you can have a more Ford press, you can have a more posterior press nothing wrong with those, as long as it’s in the threshold of the connective tissue to manage, you can rotate your press and rotate your press, you’d be surprised at what the shoulder can do in other planes of motion that couldn’t do in a painful, more vertical range of motion. So that’s kind of a big, big play. Also, you know, when I talk about, you know, adding a little cheater, right, I don’t call this a cheater I call just being functional and being smart, had a little squats that press help out on the very last bits of range of motion as you’re going through, say, you know, a weighted time drill and just need a little bit more help, versus just straining the shoulders and putting all that stress through it. When you have a lower body that can just give you a little assistance. You do it in your yard work you do it when you put things overhead in your garage, why wouldn’t you do it in your workout. And the last one I say that here again, is sometimes this the weight is too much, that it’s just too much load. You’re it’s you’re trying to the egos in play from the coach to the athlete or from the athlete to other athletes. I gotta do what Charlie’s doing next to me. Sorry, Charlie, but I’m I’m picking on it, you know, it’s like, take it easy, take the ego out of it a little bit, decrease the weight, see if the form is correct, because the load is more appropriate for the system to manage. So I love that one. Because it’s so simple. But so often, it’s just like, you got to do what the board says. And that’s not the case, right? We’re all individual athletes, we have our ways of doing things. That’s a little bit different. Now, honestly, I just thought of one one more that I did not want one to skip, is we did a lot of overhead and a lot of body positions. What about that horizontal pool? What about this, the general good old fashioned horizontal pool that we do in life, often, or especially as we’re doing physique training, want to get that good kind of row made it happen? Here’s one that I’m gonna use, I’m gonna grab on to my arm T rope here. As I get into a pool, we tend to kind of isolate and pull back right the big isolation pool, when we have so many helpers that can influence and make a pool much more functional. And as getting the hip to play first. If I get my hip to rotate back first, I get this acceleration farther away, which creates a lengthening through my lats a pre lengthening. So as my pelvis goes into rotation, it only makes my lat more eccentricly capable to get through a concentric pole. Now this is not going to give me any elasticity. But you have to imagine, as I rotate through and I get my hips and then arms, I get a much more of a whip effect in control. Right? Not crazy. And I get a proximal acceleration that allows our lats to say I gotcha shoulder, I gotcha. scapula. Let me help you out and make this a little bit more real to how life happens. Sometimes you just do an isolation pool. But often if we can have a little bit of help throw a rotational core than our shoulder says, Man I can do I can do a lot more now. Thanks for giving me a little bit more of a breath to make that happen. So a few ways to think about how this shoulder can be tweaked and modified in training and a conditioning environment. And hope this video gave you a greater understanding and insight to how you can start to think about your training and your and your conditioning a little bit better especially for those athletes on the on the do it yourself game. It’s important that we need to think about where the dysfunction is coming from not just where it is, if you want to see some more on this technology series from becoming the elbow next, if you want to see more content on Gymnazo Edu check us out on Instagram. Check out our podcasts if you want to follow me Michael Hughes on Instagram. Check me out at 3d underscore athlete and we will see you all next time.
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