Shoulder Pain

[bigazn]

I have a sharp pain in my left shoulder that only happens in a very small part of overall range of motion, maybe on inch depend on the movement. The pain occurs in during the following movements:

1. when I do a lateral raise motion (with no weight), the pain start hits when my arm is almost parallel to the ground and the stops when I go past parallel.

2. when I reach/extend, ie catching a baseball, something pain happens in the same place

3. when my arm is extended (no weight) parallel to the ground, either to the front or to the side, starting palm facing down when I rotate out thumb up in hurts like crazy

4. when I am on a 20-30% incline bench, at the starting point of the excecise, when the DB are together at the top, I have the pain espcially if I push my shoulders up off the bench (I just did this to see where the pain is)

5. when I do seated shoulder press, it hurts at the botton of the motion on first few sets, but then the pain subsides as I do more sets and increase to the weight

I injured my should/trap last year from learning how to snowboard. I think it was from constantly reaching back to push my self up after take a spill.

I have had shoulder problems before, but they always seem to go away.

I always warm up with 6-9 sets of rotator cuff exercises before I do shoulders or chest work. The pain occurs right through the range of motion espcially on the positive part of it. The the pain lessens a little the more sets I do.

I was doing for 6 weeks 12-15 rep range for excercise involving my shoulder and the pain seem to drop down significantly, but since I switch to 10-12 the pain has come back. Don't know if this is important to note or not or just a coicindence.

When I was doing sets of 5-6 last year the pain came out of nowhere and I was able to get rid of it but lightening my weight for 3 months and increasing rep range.

I wanna continue to train heavy though because I get the best growth on lower reps.

Please help me out on what to do to rehab my shoulder.

 

[musketeer]

Sounds like an impingement. I'm not a doc but have you considered a sports therapist like an ART specialist or an osteopath having a go with your sholder and back? It worked for me.

 

[coolcolj]

its a complex area - it'll take more than cuff work to fix it

I'm almost getting sick of answering this, as it;s very common and comes up every week!

once again I'll just post a bunch of random stuff from my various posts as I couldn't be assed making a proper reply

-----------------

CoolColJ wrote:
dheeel wrote:
I was wondering what exercises you recommend to help strengthen the low/mid traps, scap retractors, serratus and rear delts. Also what stretches you recommend to keep that area supple and mobile. Any help you could give me would a massive help.



well rows will never match the bench


firstly read through all parts of this series, will give you a good background info, and xercises etc

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=472224

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=535872

as far as what I did, I remeber starting off with a lot of scapular pushups. The progressed to bench dip shrugs, and then into dip shrugs - this will fix the scapular winging and strnegthen the serratus isometricly - they will get pumped up! I do high reps in the 15-40 range. after a point in time pullups became painfree so I also added pullup type shrugs or sacpular pullups

single arm face pulls, thumbs up, for rear delts. For mid/lower traps there are lots of exercses -- all of em use a overhand grip and pulls to the rib cage area, and hold at the top for a 2-3 sec count, chest high shoulders down - chest supported t-bar rows, seated pulley rows, and leaning forward dumbell upright rows pulled to the lower ribcage, using rear delts and lower/mid traps.

for the shoulder/pec/subscap flexibility and outer range strength - I grab 2 dumbells, start light say 5lbs. I normally don't use more than 12lbs.
Lie on your back and bring the dumbells up to the top of the cuban external rotation position (or halfway point of a dumbell press) and then relax so the dumbells pull back and stretch your pecs and shoulders. do for a 1min.

The other major one I do is holding both hands behind you, and roll the shoulder back and down hard - pec and shoulder stretch again. Then pull the neck back and hold and to each direction and rotation angle etc for a 10 count hold.

stretch the lats and upper traps too.

But you will find each step falling into place, as you become more and more painfree etc. once I was able to do cuban rotations painfree that opened up everything. And then front raises with thumbs up for - standing and lying down
to strengthen the serratus dynamicly

Results came pretty quickly when I did a concentrated burst of stretching and rehab work within 3 weeks.


a good link as well = bottom of page
http://www.ruggedmag.com/index.php?type=Article&i=17&a=1

stretch the crap of out of neck, upper traps, pecs/subscap, lats and delts and see what happens to your shoulder pain.
Then strengthen the lower/mid traps, rear delts and scapulars. Get the scapulars firing properly and further note the pain in the shoulders or lack of

I had pain in my shoulders years ago even when driving a car. Thanks to years of hunching over on desk, computer or playstation! Presses, benches, pullups and dips eventually started to hurt as well. But I got it sorted

Now I press and bench heavy, do tons of throwing and play BBall

let me add some recent thoughts from my training journal -

-------------------------

Well today marks the day I finally cured my left shoulder impingement! Months of cuff work never did much for it. Rear delt and mid/lower trap worked helped a bit. Pec and lat ISO stretches and scapular control work helped a lot, and the final peice of the puzzle was lots of stretching of my neck/trap and shoulder muscles. I've been doing this stretch where you hold your hands behind your back and rotate the shoulder back and down hard, while stretching you neck in every possible direction several times a day for the last week. Combine that frequent rolling of the shoulders back and down with the mid traps and hardcore trap stretches.

I can do benches, pullups, dips and presses fine now. And that's with me doing 150+ throws 4 times a week. Whereas a few years ago even cuff work used to hurt like hell! Goes to show that those exercises aren't really as bad as people say, its more to do with the underlying problems of the person. For me it was - hunching over a computer or playing Playstation games for long periods of time = tight shoulders/necks and traps...

--------------------Climbon replied
When trying to correct/recover from an injury or rehabilitate someone else, you have to look at the "big" picture. You need to take everything into account; work, posture, exercise, strength, flexibility, etc. I am of the belief that there is no bad exercise, but all exercises don't fit the individual. Overhead pressing will never cause any injury in some, but will in others because they lack the necessary flexibility or their shoulders sit in a slightly different anatomical position.

I guarantee that the cuff work you did helped you to improve. It will help most people given that these muscles are normally weak and there are muscle imbalances. You could not tell at the time because the slump/slouch posture is one of the main causes of impingement. (As a test,, bring your shoulders as far forward as you can. Now try to raise your arm overhead without pulling your shoulders back. What happens? What do you feel?)

Sorry for the long rant, but I deal with this just about every day. I am glad you are feeling better. Keep doing your stretches and your cuff work. This will help to prevent injury and use better posture when on the computer. (A strong rotator cuff will help to keep the humeral head from sliding forward in the glenoid fossa which would change the mechanics of the shoulder and would likely lead to more impingement as noted in the above test.)

-----------------------I replied

I'm not saying the cuff work didn't help, but it didn't fix my immediate problems, and it's not like I have weak cuffs from all the cleans and snatches I did. I have done cuff work before when I was younger in my BBall only days and they helped fixed my shoudler problems I developed from BBall - taken from the 10min cuff solution book

So now that I had shoulder pain again I thought if it worked before, why not do the same stuff? Well it did nothing and even made it worse!
The problem was that with my shoulder and scapular control out of wack, that doing cuff work was making things worse because the muscles in there were getting torn up against the structures in there. Now that I have fixed this, it's not a problem, but I don't really need to do isolated cuff work anymore, since cuban snatch raise and other compound external rotation work no longer cause pain.

Scapular control and strength is something that isn't talked about as much as cuff work, but I feel it's way more important. Same for mid/lower trap strength and tight traps. Just about everything makes the upper traps tight - from olys, deads and shoudler/bench work etc

If a person can do presses fine as a teenager or younger then they have no genetic problems, if they then have problems later on then it's caused by the issues listed. Which can easily be fixed.
I never had any pain in shoulders when younger, I rember doing tons of bodyweight dips/chins and presses during my boxing craze period (which requires healthy shoulders). But when I started hitting the weights seriously a few years back they did eventually cause me pain, and had to modify my form to be able to do them with less pain, same for benching, but after sorting out my problems I no longer have the same issues with em

---- then later on

My shoulder no longer hurts doing thumbs up frontraises, so I added em today to strengthen and beef up my serratus anterior muscles. To further bring up my shoulder firing balance and bulletproof my shoulder health. Bit by bit I'm completing the healthy shoulder puzzle - each step opens up a door to go further onto good as new shoulders
My shoulder feels so good now, almost like new, they used to hurt a lot just even driving a car many years ago. I'm glad I started taking steps to stretch every tight thing (neck, traps, pecs, lats), strengthen (cuffs, mid/lower traps, rear delts, serratus, scapulars) and get proper firing balance back into the surrounding muscles when I did. Otherwise I'd probably be heading into surgery right now...