Healthy Shoulders

 

by Jonathan Messner, MS, CSCS
It’s Complicated
What’s good about my social shortcomings is that they are great analogies for training. Healthy shoulder training is like Jon trying to talk to women; simple, yet he can make it ungodly complicated.
Before we move on let’s be brutally honest here. We have gotten extremely good at working with bum shoulders at JMP Fitness. If you are reading this because your shoulders are bugging you, then I implore you to do what this article suggests to a tee. Trust me.
In my mind, shoulder pain occurs because of one of two reasons (and sometimes both). 1) Poor posture and/or 2) too much activity that stresses the shoulder in an unnatural way (such as pitching, bowling, or bench-press contests). Poor posture and/or athletic overuse motions lead to the humeral head “falling out” of its socket, which stresses a bunch of muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascial trains that have really long (and confusing) Latin names. All this science stuff is making me sweat.
Anywho, your shoulder hurts, and that’s all you really need to know. Contrary to many popular t-shirts, pain is not weakness leaving the body. Pain is a very complex and complicated warning system that is telling you that you have messed up in some way, shape, or form. Pain is one of the best feedback mechanisms we have (and yet we expend much effort trying to cover it up and make it go away- I digress). You think the space shuttle was complicated? The human body makes the space shuttle look like a child’s toy.
Moving on.
Get to It, JonLets start by keeping in mind the population we train at JMP Fitness. We work with the general population over-40, semi-athletic crowd. So with that being said, the goal of our shoulder-happy programs is to try to improve posture and then try to maintain good posture while the arms move about.

1. Soft Tissue Work: We usually start with soft tissue work with our clients. One of the reasons this stuff is so important is because it teaches the difference between where someone has pain and where the potential site of the injury is (which folks get confused all the time).




2. Wall Crawl: Next we teach the individual how to properly depress the shoulders while moving the arms about. The reason we have the client slide his or her hands against a fixed the surface (the wall in this case) is because it eliminates any sort of cheating (compensatory motion). If done properly, the client should feel a stretch in the arms.


3. Seated Pec-Stretch: Then we teach proper lifting technique (which is subsequently good life posture) by teaching static pec stretching. Do not let this exercise fool you. It has taken many of our clients’ months to learn to do this exercise properly. And be wary of the master-cheater in the crowd, especially those who are high-risk individuals . Just a tiny bit of backwards shrugging will elicit pain over the long term. We know because we have made this mistake with our clients, and then we had to go back and fix it. Which is kind of cool because it makes us look like Houdini.


4. External Rotation: You can thank Eric Cressey for this one. Even though I really liked it when I first saw him do it with his athletes, I struggled with implementing it with my clients for a really long time.
With that being said, this has been my go-to exercise for happy shoulders, and even though it is challenging to coach in the beginning, clients seem to pick up on it fairly quickly.
We do this exercise against the wall so our clients have at least one plane of motion that the shoulder can stabilize in. You don’t have to do it against the wall, but the exercise becomes exponentially more complicated to teach, and with my population, that just becomes a headache.


5. Arm Curl: Next we teach the arm curl, simply because going to a row or a press is more difficult to coach (two joint exercise versus single joint exercise).


6. Seated Row & 1A Floor Press: It isn’t until the individual masters the arm curl with a pec-stretch that we have them perform a seated row. After they have mastered the seated row we will go to a one-arm floor press.


7. Mixed Pushing and Pulling: After they can do the previously mentioned exercises semi-competently, we will start to mix things up with pushups, standing rows, single-arm single-leg rows, etc.
You Have Been A Great AudienceSo there you have it, that’s how we treat shoulders at JMP Fitness. Fix your posture… and then do some other functional things.
Let me put it to you this way- training shoulders is like talking to women. You start out nervous and tongue-tied but then you relax and stand tall and your shoulders start to feel better!
Pulitzer prize here I come.