Shoulder Health, Maintenance, and Exercise: A Series on Shoulder Mastery Pt. 2
These positions that you are stuck in for hours upon hours every day mold and shape the musculature and physiology of your body. Your body is built to adapt to the demands of your environment. If sitting is your environment, your body will adapt the most comfortable sitting position and make that the default.
In part one of Shoulder Mastery, we set the base, the universal start position. As you read this, and I know you already forgot, roll your shoulders back and down and find tension in your glutes and abs. This position is the base for nearly every action we take in our lives. Walking, sitting, lifting weights, pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging, and carrying all start with tension in the glutes and abs, the shoulders rolled back, and a neutral spine and pelvis.
For many, this may not actually be possible. You may have been tied to a sitting position for so long that getting to this start position is not actually possible.
An inability to achieve this position is not uncommon and is one of the easiest way to spot future injury.
First, we should talk about the shoulder joint. Without boring you too much, the shoulder joint is a ball and socket joint. The joint is actually called the glunohumeral joint and you should forget that word instantly.
The shoulder is crazy. The arm sits in this ball and socket joint, attached to the clavicle, and is capable of moving in every plane. When we walk, the arm swings down and to our side. The joint allows us to put our arm directly over our head, directly to the side, straight in front of us, has a range of motion that allows it to move behind us, and moves freely to all points in between these end ranges. On top of all of these directions, the shoulder has the ability to internally and externally rotate in all of these positions.
Internal and external rotation are incredibly important in understanding shoulder health. To quickly understand the difference in internal and external rotation patterns in the shoulder, stretch your right arm straight over your head. From here, rotate your arm as if you are screwing in a lightbulb. This is external rotation. The armpit is facing forward and the elbow points straight in front of you. This externally rotated position is considered significantly more stable, and stronger than the its counterpart, internal rotation.
With your arm stretched overhead still, unscrew the lightbulb. You will notice the armpit turns away from the body and the elbow points to the right. You will also notice that the shoulder feels like it is slightly in front of your body. Well, it is, and it is very vulnerable in this position. Lifting any weights with internally rotated shoulders can put you on the fast track to injury and potential muscle and ligament tears. Internal rotation is important for many things like scratching your back and completing the second half of a top gun bromance high five low five combo. The largest problems we see in the shoulder are from excess internal rotation and an inability to externally rotate and bring the shoulder back to the universal start position.
On top of this massive range of motion, there are a lot of muscles that work with the shoulder, most importantly, the rotator cuff. The rotator cuff is made up of four smaller muscles: the supraspinatus, subscapularis, infraspinatus, and teres minor. Once again, forget all of those names, they are relatively unimportant until the moment something goes terribly wrong and you tear one of them. Until then, just focus on the function of the rotator cuff.
The rotator cuff uses these four muscles to tighten the ball and socket joint into the clavicle when externally rotated.
So if the shoulder is designed to do all of these things and has the musculature and stability to create strong positions, how do things go wrong?
First off, things do not just randomly go wrong. Catastrophic accidents; muscle, tendon, or ligament tears, very rarely happen.
More common, is an improper approach to systemically solving problems that have been brewing for days, weeks, months, and possibly years.
Systemic problems need systemic solutions.
Humans sit. A lot.
As I write this, I am sitting with a terrible posture. My shoulders are internally rotated, spine is rounded, and if I were to stay like this there is a chance my arm would start to go numb.
I am lucky though. I am not deskbound. Walking, coaching, and being around athletes all day allows my body the ability to move through all ranges of motion without sitting all day.
Most people do not have this option. They get stuck sitting at their desk, in their car, and compound these positions with the dreaded text neck starting at their phone.
These positions that you are stuck in for hours upon hours every day mold and shape the musculature and physiology of your body. Your body is built to adapt to the demands of your environment. If sitting is your environment, your body will adapt the most comfortable sitting position and make that the default.
So your work day is over and you head to the gym. Your shoulder has been internally rotated all day, your thoracic spine has been static, and now you want to lift heavy things over your head.
Can you see where we are going with this?
These static positions cause four main types of shoulder pain:
- Overdeveloped chest – everyone loves to bench press. But the bench press does nothing but tighten your chest. Internally rotated shoulders shortens the pec musculature. Problems compounding problems.
- Improper lat mobility – if you cannot put your arms straight over your head without weight, why are you trying to split jerk with a dysfunctional shoulder joint?
- Weak rear deltoid – in order to pull your shoulders back, there needs to be a muscle strong enough to actually hold the shoulder in its proper position. Strengthen the rear delt.
- Traps, text neck, and stress – Your head weighs 11 pounds. If it is not sitting on top of your spine, that adds a ton of stress to your traps trying to hold up your head. As you hold it up, it is stressing the traps and musculature in your neck. The traps then prevent proper function and ROM of the shoulder.
In the coming days, we will dig into each of these issues, discuss program design, and establish training protocols to heal each of these issues.
For now, stand up, squeeze your butt, find tension in your abs, and roll your shoulders back and down.
