Hey guys, do you have shoulder pain? Well, you’re in the right place. My name’s Dr. Jared Bornstein from NJ Health Performance East Brunswick, and today I’m going to show you my top three exercises for shoulder pain. Come on in.
All right, so all you need is a band. These are super cheap on Amazon.
External Rotation
The first thing we’re going to do is external rotation. In your shoulder, you have four muscles that combine to make up the rotator cuff. We’re going to stretch out—or strengthen, excuse me—two of those muscles with this external rotation move.
Wrap up the band like this so you have a good grip. You’re going to go underhand like this, and you’re just going to come out like that. Two, three—I’m already feeling the burn—three, four.
You would get three or four sets of 10, and that’s going to strengthen up the back of your shoulder, the external rotator. Anything reaching back or reaching back upward—that’s what you’re strengthening.
Internal Rotation
The next exercise we’re going to do is for the internal rotators. That’s going to be for the muscles underneath the shoulder blade.
What you’re going to do is very similar to the other exercise, but there’s a key difference. You’re getting in the same position. You still wrap up your band underhand, and you’re coming out like this. But what you’re going to be doing differently is slowly bringing one in, then coming out. Slowly bring the other one in and come out. Slowly bring the other one in and come out.
What we’re doing there is eccentrically contracting the muscles underneath here. You’re actually strengthening them while stretching them. That’s going to help with shoulder impingement, rotator cuff injuries—pretty much everything.
Scapular Retraction
The last one we’re going to do is called scapular retraction. Everyone knows what they call their wing bone. It’s called the scapula. We’re going to be practicing bringing that back, okay?
The way you do that and strengthen it is to take your band and wrap it around something sturdy. I’m going to use this chair. That should be good.
A lot of people want to instantly go like this and do a row. That’s a good exercise, but for what we want to do, we just want to focus on the scapula. It’s that little movement right there.
There’s tension in the band. Do three sets of 10 of this. It doesn’t look like much, but you can see the motion of the scapula there, moving backward. That’s what we want to focus on.
Exercises Based on Your Shoulder Injury
When you come in with a shoulder injury, those are some of the exercises that we might prescribe based on your particular situation.
If it’s a rotator cuff injury, we’ll get specific exercises—probably a lot of those. If it’s frozen shoulder, you’ll get something different. If it’s tendinitis, you’ll get something different.
The key piece to prescribing exercises is the diagnosis, but those are the top three exercises that I give for shoulder injuries. So, if you have shoulder pain, give us a call.
