When dealing with pain, whether it is in the shoulder or knee pain, no matter where it is, most of the time is treated wrong right off the bat. The number one thing most people do is rest. They stop using the shoulder thinking that will help. But that is probably the worst thing you can do even though it seems to be everyone’s first instinct is to do that.
This article is going to tell you the 3 shoulder pain relief exercises. These exercises are what should be done instead of taking 2 weeks off.
Unless you fall and sprain your ankle or you fall down the stairs, rest is not the way to go. Rest is helpful after a traumatic injury, an injury that you know how it got there. But most people have no idea what made their shoulder hurt. They just woke up with shoulder pain. And it seems to be getting worse.
Most people rest their shoulder when it hurts and usually after a period of rest, it will feel better. They will back to doing their normal activities and it will feel better until it hurts again. And this time it will hurt worse than it did before, and it will take longer for the pain to go away.
When you rest it the first time, it allows the inflammation to calm down. If you do not keep aggravating the muscle, it will not be inflamed and that is why rest for a period at first always makes it feel better.
However, when you go back to the activities that caused the inflammation but have done nothing to change anything, the shoulder will become inflamed again. It won’t be right away, it will take some time, but the pain will come back because you didn’t do anything to fix the reason it hurt in the first place and you will go back to performing the same actions that caused to it be inflamed.
Now the inflammation will come back and this time it will be worse, and you will have to rest it even longer to go away, if it even does. Also, the more and more inflammation that is caused to the muscle, the more and more likely that you will tear the muscle. The injury you are causing the muscle will become too great and the muscle will tear.
That is why it is very important if you are experiencing shoulder pain and you don’t know where it came from, meaning you didn’t have a fall, you just seemed to wake up and it was there, you need to address where it came from and fix the problem, not just treat the pain.
It is important to note that when you have shoulder pain, that is not the time to rest. You need to do things not to aggravated it but resting it is not the answer. For example, if lifting your arm overhead is causing you pain, you do not want to continuously lift your arm overhead causing it to be painful. But what you do want to do is to perform exercises that are going to strengthen the muscles that are going to cause it not to hurt when you lift overhead.
The first of these exercises is a posture exercise.
You want to roll your shoulders up, back and drop them down. This is not a gym exercise, it should be done all day long.
Why do you do this? Because most of us walk around with our shoulders shrugged high and up at our ears and we don’t realize we are doing it, which makes it hard to correct. But once you realize that you do it, it is easy to catch during the day and correct.
If you\’re doing a high intensity workout or lifting heavy weights and you get tired, you will shrug your shoulders in order to be able to help lift the weight. It is the first thing that\’s going to happen. You want to lift the weight and your body wants you to lift the weight so it will use any muscles in order to do so. Because the goal is to tire your muscles out and therefore as your muscles get tired, your body will recruit new ones to help it do the motion.
Your body\’s not going to tell you to stop the moving. Your body is going to do what is necessary to allow you to do the movement. So, it is very important to roll your shoulders up, back and drop them down before each repetition and sacrifice some speed but do it correctly.
Why is this important? Because in between the bone that sits on top of your shoulder (part of your scapula) and your arm (humerus) bone, there’s a muscle that runs in between there. When this muscle gets pinched you start to feel pain. That muscle then becomes inflamed. Then you wind up with an injury called impingement because the muscle is constantly being pinched. And eventually that pinching leads to tearing.
The next exercise to do after you roll your shoulders up back and drop them down is bend your elbows to 90 degrees and turn your palms up. Now just squeeze your shoulder blades together like you are squeezing a towel between them. This is not a big movement so don’t make it one. You can see what this exercise looks like by watching the video below.
You want to do about three sets of 30 of those. It’s not a weight lifting exercise, it is an endurance exercise.
The final exercise to do is with a rubber band or you can do it without one. Set up the same way as the last exercise with your palms up and your elbows at 90 degrees. This time keeping your elbows bent you want to rotate your hands outward. Again, you can watch this exercise done in the video above.
The main thing is that you push your shoulders down as your shoulders and hands rotate out. For this one you are going to do 3 sets of 30 again.
If you are experiencing shoulder pain in Hatfield or shoulder pain in North Wales or shoulder pain in Harleysville then call 215-997-9898 to have a free consultation with a Doctor of Physical Therapy.
