Top 5 Shoulder Impingement Exercises

in this video I'm going to show you five exercises to fix your shoulder impingement including one of my all-time favorite stretches that hits a muscle that nobody else ever really talks about so if you're ready let's get ready to think right move right and feel right if you're watching this video it's because you've probably noticed you have trouble lifting your arm out to the side or your overhead Mobility like this is severely limited and you can only get to like here not being able to lift your arm out to the side or up in front of you maybe a bit of a bummer and feel really frustrating because Normal Life requires us to actually do stuff with our arms it's even more frustrating if you really enjoy working out and you can no longer do chin UPS or overhead presses or push-ups because your shoulders just feel like garbage as you've done your internet research you may have seen that surgeons and Physicians sometimes claim that the problem is with a bone and that your acromion meaning this bone right up here is shaped wrong and if the bone is shaped wrong then the only solution is surgery to cut that bone yep that's exactly what I've seen on the internet and if you've done a really good job of Internet research you may have discovered that shoulder impingement surgery is actually not really better than a fake Placebo shoulder surgery so you're saying I should sign up for the placebo surgery no what I'm saying is you should ATM always think muscles without muscles your bones don't change position if you're having trouble getting your bones to get into a certain position it's because your muscles don't know how to help you achieve it so should I just rest no because rest doesn't train your muscles to do anything rest just teaches your muscles to atrophy what about icing it last I checked ice doesn't improve your flexibility or strength so maybe maybe I'll just get an injection or take some pain pills and train through it numbing yourself to the signals your body is trying to use to communicate with you is a great way to make sure your body feels worse in the long run so let me implore you don't get caught in rips rest ice injections pills and surgery are just not good long-term Solutions you want to make sure that you teach your muscles to have strength at every length or sail for short so muscles like the lats which go from your low back up to the front of your arm bone or the pecs that go from your chest to the arm bone or even that weird little muscle the subscapularis which is here on the front of your shoulder and to the front of your arm bone can all drastically impinge upon the available range of motion which is going to lead to symptoms of impingement those muscles can also be pulling the humerus into weird positions and if you don't have enough strength on the back of the shoulder to control the humeral position then you may run into some pinching impingement so in this video I'm going to show you five exercises that will help you fix your shoulder impingement without getting surgery and without doing silly things like just resting and resting and resting all right so we're going to start off by working on some massage techniques for your shoulder and your chest if you've been doing a bunch of pressing like bench press push-ups you've been doing overhead raises where you probably haven't been because your shoulder hurts so much you've been doing rows you might have been doing pull-ups or chin-ups all of those exercises can get the shoulder muscles and the chest muscles to really shrink up and tighten up so it can be helpful to do the massage work that frees that up so you can get your range of motion and you might find that you get your range of motion back very quickly so first we're going to take this ball use a tennis ball to start off with something softer lacrosse ball when you want something harder or any other Implement when you feel like you're ready for something harder then you're going to be working first across the front of the chest and the shoulder here so PEC muscles are all here and the anterior deltoid is right here the PEC also attaches across the front of your shoulder so you're going to put it up against the wall and just lean into it the farther your feet are from the wall the more pressure you're going to have moving in towards the ball breathe naturally find the spots that feel like they are really dense and really stiff they're probably going to feel kind of painful what I don't want you to do is press super hard trying to find the most painful thing you can find that's not what we're trying to do we're just trying to find the stuff that is obviously stiff and dense and that obviously feels like it shouldn't feel like that so if you feel like you're having to press super hard you have to having to do like a really massive effort to find something then go look somewhere else okay then you're gonna just keep looking search find all over the pec muscle anything that feels like it's just like a sharp bundle of muscle okay so we're going through all that after you've done that I want you to test right just move away from the wall so that everyone can see you on camera and then you're just gonna test see what your range of motion is like now a lot of times what you'll find is the muscles here they lock down and they stop you from being able to raise your arm they stop your overhead motion so this alone can be a big help but we're not finished yet we're going to take the ball and we're gonna go under here so kind of to the side of your armpit you can go a little into the armpit while we're doing it too but we're really looking to go on the side of the armpit and along the triceps here so it's going to go down along the side of the scapula and down along the ribs so you're going to stick that against the wall and then you can just lean into it like so search again find those dense spots and focus on feeling the meaty stiff parts of your muscle again I don't want you to focus on putting a bunch of pressure on Bones so if you feel like you're just on a really bony part like your scapula and you don't really have a lot of muscle on the lateral border of your scapula which for many people that'll be true you just won't have that much here then don't press harder into the bone make sure you're on meat if you've been doing a lot of pull-ups and rows or surfing or swimming you may have well-developed wings and lats here and you definitely want to be on that meaty muscular area so just go ahead and go in there now once you have done that then test see what your range of motion is like again you may notice things have greatly improved those are going to be your two biggest bang for the buck areas to massage but you can also work on the outer side of the shoulder meaning the deltoid area here and you can also work on the side of your neck here just like so or you could even do this in a doorway another great place to massage is the back of the shoulder blade so you can also take the ball stick it against the wall and then boom you're on it lean into it find those areas that just light up and talk to you again don't press super super hard just to smash bone you're looking for muscle that feels like it's stiff and dense and that feels grateful for the attention that you're giving to it right now so should I do this on both sides yes you definitely want to do both sides because you don't want one side to suddenly be free and unimpinged and then notice that the other side is now suddenly impinged obviously you can spend more time on the side that feels Less Mobile but make sure you give some love to that side that's already doing well find the areas that feel like they need the massage so this is going to require you to learn to listen to your body and what it's saying to you if you get onto a spot and it feels absolutely horrible terrible and you're just pushing harder and harder and harder and harder then you are doing it wrong you want to just be able to relax into it if it feels initially like your body says Whoa then you want to take the pressure off a little bit so that you can still breathe and gradually ease into it so that the muscle can relax around the ball and if you are somebody who doesn't have a lot of muscle in any of the areas that I just showed you then you don't really need to focus on doing a lot of massage and in fact if there isn't much muscle there and you don't feel meat that's responding to the massage then just stop doing the massage altogether and focus on the other exercises that are in this video how long should I massage my shoulders spend about a minute on each region so that would be a minute here on the front a minute on the underside and if you do the other areas and spend about a minute on those areas as well and for the good shoulder that doesn't feel as bad you can spend less time maybe just 30 seconds per region and that'll be fine so now that we've done some massage we're going to work on restoring some thoracic spine extension so a lot of us spend a lot of time in thoracic spine flexion and that creates this problem because too much collection in the thoracic spine causes our shoulder blades to tilt forward and that changes the angle that we're using to get abduction meaning raising our arms out to the side is different because the shoulder blade is in a different orientation if we are standing up straight then we can raise our arms again the right way so let's go ahead and improve thoracic extension by getting right up against the wall with your feet just a few feet maybe one one and a half feet away from the wall you're going to flatten your lower back keep your abs engaged you should feel like you have total contact here with your lower back and the top of your butt then you are probably doing this right now or something close to this I want you to tuck your chin so you're kind of looking down then I want you to take the back of your head and bring it towards the wall okay so don't use your hand that was just to point at my head you're going to just keep the chin tucked keep looking a little bit diagonally down towards the floor and then keep the back your head against the wall you should now feel like the lumbar spine meaning the lower spine all the way up up until we get to the cervical spine meeting your neck that should all be touching the wall right now you may find this to be very difficult you may find that you're kind of stuck here you may find that you want to do this all those things are normal they're very common Sensations but I want you to keep fighting keep looking diagonally down tuck this chin pull the back of your head back get as close as you can without doing this and I promise you gradually you're going to see Improvement so you're just going to hold this position hold it for a minute to up to three minutes but the first time just start with a minute it's cool you should start to feel that the muscles between your shoulder blades and along your spine are working on that glorious day when you actually achieve the back of your head against the wall get yourself an ice cream what if this exercise really feels easy for me that's great then let's just move on what if this exercise feels really hard um I'm asking for a friend keep working on this slowly and keep paying attention to your form don't rush it feel for the right muscles along your spine so that you're gradually able to get extension out of the thoracic spine don't try to cheat it this next exercise is going to help you stretch out the lat muscles which start from your low back and go up along your ribs and shoulder blade and connect to the front of your arm bone which means this big muscle drastically affects your range of motions so we're going to start off with a simple exercise I'm going to demonstrate it with a couch but you can use a wall you can use any stable piece of furniture you can use a counter a fence whatever you got so I'm just going to show you with the couch I'm going to grab a hold here I'm going to block the couch with my legs so it can't slide while I pull on it I'm going to take the same side leg and I'm going to move it away so I'm trying to drop everything away from this hand so I got my left hand holding left hip left foot moving away from the left shoulder this is going to give a stretch through the armpit down along the side of the ribs and into a little bit of the low back important things to think about here don't go into a big arch don't try to stick your booty out because that actually cheats the stretch your lat muscle gets most stretch when you're actually tucking your tailbone down here so that your low back stays rounded okay so don't go into this Arch but rather keep it here and then you're going to stretch all this stuff out if you're holding on to a wall it'll allow you to change foot positions whereas right now with the couch I have to block the couch with my leg but you know if you're at the office and you just have to do something just go grab a sofa and do this a wall works really well you can still adjust upper body position you can see I'm I can look at you and stretch it out find angles that you can tolerate do this for a minimum of 30 seconds do it for a minute if you can if anything starts getting numb of course take a break and just stay within the range that feels doable where you can still breathe also if you feel like you go into it and you're feeling like something is pinching on the shoulder right like you you go in and you start to lower yourself and it pinches right in the front of the shoulder don't go so far okay so you're going to just stay within a pain-free range of motion feel the challenge in the armpit along the ribs keep breathing and keep feeling for muscle fibers stretching you'll know that you're getting the right stuff when you feel the sensation is following a path along the side of your body right it should be like the fibers of the muscles they run like this okay so if you feel like oh there's like this line of sensation trickling along my side that means you're actually stretching the right muscles if you feel a jam that just goes in a weird direction that cuts across it cuts perpendicular to the flow of those muscle fibers then you're not doing the right thing okay see we're looking to feel the right muscles and the right muscle fibers all the time and of course we're going to do both sides making sure that if one side is obviously stiffer than the other side that you do an extra round for that side that's stiffer what if I want this to be a little bit harder great question this is actually a very beginner version of one of the most effective exercises you can do if you have shoulder impingement so now let's look at the progression that will really yield huge results for your shoulder hey I want to say thanks to Marjorie for your 50 donations and to Pamela Lynn and Ellen thank you so much for your donations via PayPal if you want to support this channel too use the PayPal or patreon links in the description box I want to use the join and thanks buttons on YouTube now let's get back to it the most magical exercise for fixing shoulder impingement symptoms is to Simply hang from a bar that's placed overhead so to do this I suggest you start off with a regressed version which is to use some sort of chair or a stool to help you take off some of the weight from your arms and your fingers and from the muscles of your shoulder you're going to use your feet to just figure out how much your hands your wrists your forearms your elbows your shoulders can actually take over time you can use less and less help from your legs and feet and then over time you just get rid of the help so that you're just hanging but when you first start I really suggest you do not go into a full hang because you will regret it greatly tell me why I would regret it you would not tell somebody who just learned how to swim the doggy paddle to go out for an open ocean water race because it is just not a good idea if your muscles have had trouble just getting your arms overhead then they're going to have a lot of trouble supporting the entire weight of your body as you hang from the shoulder joints so when you first start out use assistance and hang as much body weight as you can while still feeling like you can breathe and while still feeling like the right muscles are stretching meaning I want to feel stretch I want to feel a challenge all along this open side of my shoulder you should not be feeling pinching or jamming right here so if you feel pinching or jamming on the top of your shoulder put more weight into your feet let your legs help you so that you can feel the actual work and struggle of the muscles from hands down into the shoulder I also want you to keep your abs engaged so that your low back feels flatter rather than just allowing the low back to Arch a bunch and your abs to just go you want to do your hangs for 30 to 60 seconds when it feels like you need less help then go ahead and lift a foot and only use one leg to give yourself a little bit of help and you can do that for you know 15 seconds 20 seconds and then give yourself help again over time you'll be able to make it longer and longer maybe to 30 then 40 35 then 60 seconds with just a little help and then when you're there you can progress to no help for maybe 10 seconds and then help for 20 seconds no help help or just do this for 30 seconds giving yourself little bits of help you can be creative about it the goal is to over time be able to take away all the help and still feel like you're using the right muscles without getting jamming or pinching anywhere in your shoulders I'm pretty strong so I'm pretty sure I don't need to start with help I'm just going to go for it stop just stop please use assistance when you first start yo I've done pull-ups and chin-ups my whole life that's true but something about the way you've been training your body has led to this situation where you get shoulder impingement symptoms so maybe just maybe it might be a good idea to take my advice and use some assistance when you first start I'm pretty sure I can take you in a fight that's probably true but you would have to catch me first now let's move on to the next exercise now I'm going to show you one of my favorite chest opening stretches of all time okay so you're going to take a fist take the fatty soft side you're going to put it in a doorway or up against the wall is fine too then you're going to turn away from that hand keeping the elbow right there against your side just go as far as you can go until you feel a stretch you may feel this stretch around the elbow you may feel it in the triceps you may feel it in the chest just beneath the clavicle you may feel it across the front of your shoulder whatever you do do not do this fast go slowly and find the spot that feels like whoa those muscles don't really know how to be there breathe calmly take your time 30 60 Seconds and just enjoy as those muscles learn to lengthen then you can continue to turn keep your abs engaged so that you don't go into a big arch because that's a common compensation and just keep going this is going to stretch out the pecs it's going to stretch out a little bit of the triceps it's going to stretch out the subscapularis which is a muscle that's super weird that's on the front side of your scapula meaning it's between your scapula and your ribs and then it attaches to the front of your shoulder that subscap muscle gets used a lot to create internal rotation of your shoulder so when you're doing things like pull-ups you're actually using subscap to maintain your arm position right relative to your body subscap is working to help you do that and we don't often stretch the subscap so this helps you stretch the subscap which is going to blow your mind after you've finished with one side make sure to switch over to the other side same deal just breathe relax 30 to 60 seconds feel the stretch in the right place keep the ABS engaged and enjoy that crazy stretch a couple things you can do to increase the stretch and to explore in this stretch is to lean away from the wall you can bend your head to the side so you feel the stretch even into your neck you can adjust your body position so you can kind of lean a little forward you can lean away you can also play with the hand position so bringing the hand up higher and bringing the elbow away or higher and then move the whole rib cage forward in a way it's all good start exploring the goal here is to create more external rotation so if you think about it you can be like a pitcher here right you're trying to wind up and get that external rotation and then throw so you can also bring your arm up higher and then go into that deep subscap PEC minor Peck major stretch and just let yourself lean forward and enjoy that position do it on both sides if you're going to experiment with that higher position make sure you experiment equally so that you can see how the two sides compare and if you find that one side is very clearly more restricted than the other spend some time doing the more restricted side for an extra set okay so you're saying I should go as hard as I can as fast take your time go slow because slow is safe and fast is foolish I used to be a pitcher in Little League so I'm pretty sure my external rotation is already really good I don't need to do this it's time to live in the now if you used to play baseball you used to be a gymnast you used to be flexible you used to have a body that didn't hurt that's cool now let's work on getting back to that by exposing the weaknesses and the restrictions that are in your body right now and finally a great way to just build up a little more endurance in the muscles around your shoulder is to just bring your hands up and out to the side and start doing some arm circles make sure that the motion is coming from the shoulder joint and not just from you flapping your wrists around great way to do that is to bend your fingers in so that you've just got the Palm open here and then start swimming so it's like you're doing the butterfly stroke this is going to work on the muscles on the tops of your shoulder right now so your middle deltoids a little bit of the anterior deltoids and you're just going to keep going just keep going until you feel fatigued this may seem ridiculously easy and simple and if it is good then you can start holding on to weight and build some more strength here if it is challenging then don't use weight just go until you feel the fatigue take a little rest maybe 30 seconds maybe a minute then you're going to go Palms up and then go backwards so you're just doing circles kind of like you're doing a reverse butterfly like you're trying to swim as inefficiently as possible while lying on your back okay you just do this until you get fatigued you're going to feel those deltoids working you'll feel the upper traps you'll feel super spinatus working you'll feel those muscles get tired those muscles often quite white atrophied in a lot of people for guys who are in the gym a lot they may be nice and built up and that's cool so if that's you and you feel like this doesn't really do anything then go ahead and hold on to some light weights you can start with a pound and then just gradually build it up if this just feels super easy for you cool guess what you can also do the bent over version which is going to help you target the rear deltoids so just like this same thing you're going to hinge you can get as close to parallel to the floor as you can and then you're just going to continue doing those circles if you have any trouble with your balance or your flexibility you can just put your butt against the wall and then do this same exercise this means you're not going to feel like you have to work as hard with your hips and your legs and your lower back because your butt is up against the wall super simple nice and stabilized and then you can reverse it I would suggest keeping the thumbs pointing down so you can really continue to work the posterior shoulder you can go with the thumbs pointing up but again I really prefer that you keep the thumbs down so you can work on the rear delts and also the triceps to get that posterior shoulder stability that's going to really help you keep the shoulder in a good position when you start to lift up and out to the side what I've seen in my own personal experience is that when these muscles get too weak the humerus meaning the arm bone kind of shifts forward and then you lose smooth range of motion and then you're not happy what if I don't want to be happy then go watch another Channel on YouTube where somebody will happily tell you that there's really nothing you can do to fix your own body and you should just keep going to doctors to get painkillers until you need surgery okay I just did it now can I get a recap of everything you talked about in this video thank you and absolutely so the first thing we're going to start with is massaging you're going to try to open up the muscles on the front of your shoulder and down here along the side of your armpit that's going to be your chest muscles your anterior delt and your lats Ooh baby your lats you've also got optional regions that you can massage including the back of the shoulder blade and up into the neck spend about one minute on each region that you're working on and do both sides if one side is clearly stiffer than the other then give it more time make sure to test after you've done the massage to see how things feel and if massage doesn't feel like it's really doing anything for you or you don't really have much muscle to massage then don't do the massage then you want to work on restoring thoracic spine extension so that your shoulder blades are sitting in the right orientation when you are walking around and testing your shoulder Mobility do that exercise with good form for one to three minutes so that you feel the muscles in your thoracic spine working to create that extension then you can do the lat stretch using a piece of furniture or by doing a hang from a bar that's overhead make sure you are using a level of difficulty that feels doable one where you can still breathe and one where you feel the challenge in the right muscles whether you're doing one arm at a time or you're hanging do sets of 30 to 60 seconds if you're doing one arm at a time do two sets per arm and maybe an extra set if you have one side that's much stiffer than the other if you are doing the Hang then do it for two sets of 30 to 60 seconds each set for my super favorite chest opener stretch I would do at least two sets on each side for a 30 to 60 seconds per side and an extra round for the stiffer side make sure that you explore find different angles different positions so that you challenge that subscapularis that sneaky sneaky subscapularis in all kinds of different positions and finally for the arm circles you're just going to fatigue the idea here is to just build up some strength and endurance in the muscles around the back of the shoulder and the top of the shoulder so you can do them this way or standing whatever you want to do is fine maybe do both one to two rounds going forward and backward whatever floats around vote is going to be fine and we don't need to be super exact just make sure that you're gradually increasing the amount of time you're doing it for or the number of reps so just set a timer or just count in your head what if I can't count past 15. uh I I don't I don't have an answer to that when you first start out I want to remind you not to yourself with soreness so if you feel like doing this routine is a big challenge to the muscles of your shoulder and you feel really stiff and sore and you're a little bit sketched out by that sensation then just take it easy start off with a once a day Pace or even less if you feel a little bit if on the other hand you feel like whoa this is amazing my shoulders are so free now then you can experiment with doing it a little more often just be sure you stay a little more conservative and don't try to over tax your shoulders especially when we're thinking about the hanging exercises you don't want to go Full Throttle on those right away without having built up endurance and build up the strength to do it safely you may also find it really helpful to do these stretches throughout the day because tippity tap type typing really doesn't do you any good for improving shoulder Mobility if you want more resources to fix your shoulder pain be sure to check out the shoulder fix program which I will link to in the description box and up above in the shoulder fix program I have practical follow-along workouts in a practical weekly schedule that'll help you improve your shoulder flexibility and strength for more free videos to help you with your shoulders check out these here to support this channel use the thanks button the join button or the PayPal or patreon links you'll find in the description box like share and subscribe this Bell notification on and as always I hope you remember that pain sucks life should the bunch

Channel: Upright Health

Views: 76,811

Keywords: fix shoulder impingement, shoulder impingement exercises, shoulder impingement fix, best exercises for shoulder impingement, shoulder pain exercises, shoulder stretches for impingement, shoulder impingement stretches, shoulder exercises, shoulder impingement, shoulder pain, shoulder pain relief, shoulder stretches, shoulder hurts, shoulder mobility, flexible shoulders, how to fix shoulder pain, best shoulder exercise, Upright Health

Id: _-oHVOrZEWw

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022