- I've got a frozen shoulder. In this video, I'm gonna show
you three exercises that I use to fix my frozen shoulder fast. If you watch till the end of this video, you will understand how I
reverse engineered my problem so I can move my shoulder freely, and it only took me two days. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, it's Matt
Hsu from Upright Health, where we help you move
beyond your limitations so you can live with confidence. Quick tip, if you scroll down
to the description section, you will find helpful links as well as a link to
our free shoulder tips, which will teach you exercises that'll keep your
shoulders happy and healthy and get rid of that cranky feeling from being on the computer
or the smartphone all day. So check that out. I just got back from a
trip to Spain and Portugal, where I did battle with a
nasty bout of frozen shoulder and managed to knock it out. So I'm gonna be showing you
the exercises that I did that knocked it out for me in two days. While I was traveling, I had brought along an
exercise band or two to help me do some detailed
work with my shoulders. And I had also brought
along some TRX straps so that I could do some bigger motions that involved rowing and pulling motion so I could keep my upper
body feeling pretty strong. Every night I would
basically gorge on tapas, come home and do some light
exercise with these tools. And one morning I ended up waking up with really, really bad shoulder pain. Like I could barely rotate my arm. I could barely flex. I could barely move my
shoulder into extension. I couldn't put a jacket
on like going back, like that was really painful. And it was just nuts. Like I had never felt my
shoulder up this badly before. The first exercise I
used was a self massage using my man bag. Basically I use the strap
to dig into the upper traps and the levator scap. And I used my left hand
to push down on the bag so that the strap would
drag into the muscle and drag the muscle down
and back towards my butt. Using the man bag and pulling
the strap down and back, I was able to get the upper traps to relax so that my shoulder blade
could just sit down. And I would also use some
motions with my head and neck kind of tilting and turning away to get any intention through
the front of the neck and through the front of
the chest to relax as well so the shoulder could sit back into place. The next thing I focused
on was doing a simple and convenient lat stretch. I did this all over the place. I did this on right hand railings, at really famous landmarks,
like the Alhambra. I did this just on the street randomly. I did this in the bedroom. I was just doing lat stretches a bunch. Basically, you just need
to get your hand and arm on top of something with the palm up. And then you wanna keep
your spine in neutral as you move down towards
the floor where the head and the chest coming down, down, down. You wanna feel stretch in the armpit. You wanna keep the Palm up the whole time and the elbow straight to make sure your body's not
cheating out of the stretch. You can also pull the
hip away from the armpit. So in this case, the right
hip away from the right armpit to accentuate the stretch so you feel that stretch along
the ribs and into the armpit. Doing that stretch actually
really noticeably helped, but it still wasn't right. And I could tell that when I went up in the shoulder flection, my arm kept trying to come
into internal rotation. So that made me think, okay, the lat is really,
really playing into this because the lat, as you flex, it's gonna try to fight you and force you into internal rotation. So I wanted to modify the stretch to make it even more intense. So what I did was I put my
elbow on a rail or on the bed and kept the elbow bent. And then I took a bottle to use as a tool to help me increase external rotation while doing this stretch. So I would use my left hand to push the bottle towards the right side, which would force the shoulder
into external rotation as I went deeper and
deeper into the stretch. Now that just lit up
that whole armpit area with a stretch sensation. So if you're trying this at home, you wanna make sure you feel
this as a stretch sensation. If you jam into this too hard, too fast, or you go beyond where
the healthy range is, you'll feel pinching and stuff
going on in the shoulder. What you wanna feel is stretching going on around the armpit, you may feel it pretty
intensely in the triceps and also down the side of the rib cage or around the shoulder blade. You don't wanna feel it in
the front of the shoulder. What I wanted to focus
on also doing the stretch was moving through the
full range of motion, bending and extending my elbow, not just keeping it in one place and finding all those
really tight, intense spots. After doing that stretch
for about two minutes, I got about 80% of my
range of motion back, which was pretty amazing. So I kept doing that stretch
for 30 seconds, two minutes, multiple times a day, anytime I felt my shoulder tightened up and that just kept my shoulder
going in the right direction. And after about two days, my range of motion was
basically all the way back. My shoulder didn't feel perfect, but I was already able
to do cartwheels again. And that was pretty good for me and definitely good enough to
enjoy the rest of my vacation and go dancing at a cool
ecstatic dance thing in Lisbon. (upbeat music) Whenever you're trying
to troubleshoot something with your body, whether it's your shoulder or any other part, you need to keep your own
specific training context in mind, whether you train a lot,
whether you don't train at all, whether you do the same
motions all the time, you need to think about them so you can troubleshoot
and solve the problem specific to you. It's not just about saying,
well, I have a frozen shoulder and it's the same solution for everybody. You need to based on
how your body responds. So I wanna take you through
my own thought process with my shoulder. So a quick note on what
causes frozen shoulder. In the conventional medical theory, frozen shoulder is this
kind of bizarre phenomenon that happens when the
capsule around the shoulder just kind of locks up and then you can't move because the capsule is all locked up. So the way to treat that
from the medical perspective is to try to bust that capsule loose. There's things like injections. There's things like really
aggressive stretching. There's things like
conservative, gentle, stretching, there's manipulation under anesthesia. There's all these things
out there to try to speed up the capsule release, but nothing is really sure fire. Over the last 10-ish years, where I've been working with people with different pain issues, as they're trying to train and get their bodies moving better, what I've seen is that
people with frozen shoulder actually benefit a lot by
focusing on training the muscles that control the bones
of the shoulder joint. And it really makes sense because muscles really do
normally control motion. So if you can get those muscles to actually deal with the bones better and like establish
balance around the joint, then you can get the
joint moving freely again. So that's the attitude I took when I was dealing with
my frozen shoulder. I thought, hey, what muscles
are going wrong here? For the first day I
just kind of let it rest and I just kind of gently moved it. I massaged around a little bit hoping that it would get better if I was just kind of going easy on it. But that didn't really help. So on the second day, I,
I said to myself, look, I need to solve this because
I got a vacation to enjoy. Let's do this. To reverse engineer the problem, I looked at the exercises
I had already been doing. So I noticed that I'd been
doing a lot of rowing exercises. I had been doing a lot of exercises where I was pulling the
band low, like this. And I'd also been doing
exercises with my arms overhead, like doing handstand work against the wall and cartwheels and things like that. Now, the thing is, I also noticed that I couldn't externally
rotate much at all. I could go internal, but external rotation
was really locked down. And flection was also pretty locked down. And if I went up into
more shoulder flection, things would get really pinchy up near the front of the humerus. So that gave me my first couple of clues. And then I noticed that I
had this annoying sensation of my shoulder wanting to elevate and pull forward like this. So I started thinking about
how to change that relationship of my shoulder blade and rib cage and get these muscles to
kind of sit back down. If you've got a frozen shoulder or you just got cranky shoulders from sitting at a computer all day, be sure to check out the
Free Shoulder Tips Program that you'll find down in
the description section. If you liked this video, be sure to click the like button and share this video with somebody who has gotten frozen shoulder. Don't forget to subscribe to our channel. And as always, I hope you
remember that pain sucks, life shouldn't. (gentle music)
