Shoulder Pain

By Greg Hammons.

A lot of people have shoulder pain when lifting and doing pressing exercise but most people don’t have bad shoulders.

With pain there is always a cause and effect. We can’t just treat the effect (the pain), and expect it to get better because without addressing the cause the pain will always return. In many cases with shoulder pain that cause is poor scapular rhythm.

That means the shoulder blade doesn’t move correctly against your thoracic cage, limiting the range of motion. So, to fix that, our body compensates and we start to round and make other adjustments to finish the ROM we want to use. That causes pain.

One of the biggest contributing factors to poor rhythm is small muscle called the Serratus Anterior. This little muscle moves the scapula lateral and allows upward rotation, which is vital to lifting and pressing overhead. Try SMR on the wall with a ball to help improve your ROM and eliminate some shoulder pain.

Published on: Feb 27, 2017