Shoulder Mobility Balancing Act (CAREFUL!!)

Build muscle while keeping your shoulders healthy

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX. com. Today we’re going to take a look inside your shoulder to see just how important it is that you’re focusing on those things that you might think are unimportant. Especially the small things when you’re trying to focus on the bigger things and the bigger lifts in the gym.

Right here, this represents your shoulder. We’re breaking out a muscle marker, or at least half of one, to show you that your shoulder actually looks something like this. What I’m representing here is the ball and the socket. The first thing you need to realize is that socket ain’t so big. The ball is much bigger than it, and that means two things.

Number one: lots of ability to move the ball of the upper arm around. So you can do lots of things. You can move your arms in all crazy planes. Much more motion than you’d have in, let’s say, a finger that does this, and maybe a little bit of twisting. That said, you’re sacrificing the stability of your shoulder because of this.

We only have three things that we can focus on in order to arm ourselves the best way to have a much more stable shoulder and stay injury free when we’re focusing on those big lifts. So the firs thing you want to make sure that you’re focusing on is the labrum. That is, keeping the health of your labrum as a high priority. Now, dumb me was in baseball, as you guys know, and I got bet by one off our players that I couldn’t throw the ball from right field to third base on the fly. Now, I should have known better, but it just looked so damn close to me from out there that I tried.

I’m not equipped to be throwing a baseball like that, especially when I’m not warmed up at all, and I took my hardest throw I possibly could. It certainly didn’t make it all the way there and as soon as I did I felt the big tear right through my shoulder. I could feel a burning sensation. I tore my labrum and I’ve been dealing with it ever since. Why does that matter?

Because the labrum actually deepness this socket. So what it’s doing is, it’s job is to try to create some more depth and stability inside this shoulder joint. So while it was sitting on top of that little pen cap, realizing that surface here is much smaller than the ball itself, let’s just take the plate out to illustrate a second point. That is, if there was no labrum there the ball would have to do this balancing act on a very shallow surface. But with the labrum intact we’re actually creating more depth and we’re creating much more stability here for the head to stay inside the socket while it moves.

So you want to do everything you can to not do stupid shit like me and tear you labrum. That’s something that can happen traumatically, or can happen over time, but the things that happen over time are generally because you have bad mechanics in the other two areas I’m going to cover. The first one there is going to be your rotator cuff. So we talk about the rotator cuff all the time and those are the muscles that wrap around and interplay with each other. There’s four muscles here.

Three of them are really, really important to interplay with this humerus to keep it centered as you move your arm up and down. So if as you were moving your arm up, over your body it also wanted to move up and migrate up, you’d have problems because you’d be getting pinching here with the supraspinatus tendon inside the shoulder joint itself, causing inflammation, bursitis; all these bad things that lead you to go “Ow! ” Every time you try to lift a bar, or a dumbbell overhead. So it’s trying to keep it centered and we want to make sure to do is train those muscles. Now I’ve put a whole video together on specific exercises you can do with your rotator cuff, but here’s just a couple.

I’m going to link there, too. But here’s a couple you want to focus on as well. Mostly external rotation. When we talk about external rotation it can happen in many different planes of motion. It can be with my elbow right here at my side, that way.

It can be more of a diagonal cross-pattern where I reach down this way, and then come up, and overhead. That’s going to look more like a throwing athlete. But we want to make sure that we’re strengthening the external rotation because that does allow us to keep this humerus centered in here on this very shallow, slightly deepened surface because of the labrum. The next thing you want to do is focus on the third component. That is the capsular element to this.

The capsule is a series of structures that wrap around the head of the humerus that tighten and loosen, depending on the position that you move your arm in. one of the things that we find ourselves constantly, and chronically in is this forward, rounded position. A lot of times what’s happened here is we get capsular tightness because of the fact that we posturally are sitting in these positions all the time. That could be coming from muscle imbalance that could be coming from a lack of attention to the external rotators; whatever it might be. If you’re finding that you’re rounded this way then you’d better probably surmise that you also have a real bad capsular tightness, too.

So if you have rounded shoulders what you might want to start doing is stretching out the posterior capsule of your shoulder. Now why is that? Because as you get anterior you get weakened anteriorly. This muscle, the head of the humerus sits forward and is stretching out this part of the shoulder capsule. That’s not good.

Then the one in the back gets tighter and tighter, which is even further pushing this forward this way. So we want to be able to stretch that out back. You can do that by doing this sleeper stretch here. You lay down on the ground, put your elbow in the position I’m showing you here. Make sure that you’re stabilizing up against the ground – you’re pushing against your forearm – and you’re trying to go down into internal rotation, which is going to push this head of the humerus backwards into that capsule and stretch it out.

You’re actually using the bone itself to push back into that capsule and stretch it out. You should feel a pretty big stretch by doing that. As a matter of fact, from an anterior side we get chronically loose and weak because all we do is have this thing pushing forward and we could even aggravate that, as I’ve shown in the past, by doing pec stretches like this that people always tend to do. We’ve covered that in a video as well. I can link that here, why you don’t want to do that.

The idea is that you quickly want to realize that the interplay of keeping a healthy labrum, of keeping good balance between all the muscles of the rotator cuff, and by keeping this attention to the posture that you’re in, and what it could be doing to the shoulder capsule, and the ligaments, and what the balance between those are is ultimately going to say “this shoulder feels good”, or “this shoulder does not feel good”. When you go to the big lifts like a bench press, like an overhead shoulder press the things that are going to help you add muscle in the gym; if you can’t do them because every time you move your shoulder around there’s too much instability, or you’re just in too much pain then you’re going to be in for a whole hell of a lot of disappointment. And that shouldn’t be the case. You focus on the little things and the big things will become much easier. That’s what ATHLEANX is all about.

We put the science back in strength here to help you understand why these things matter and not just tell you to go do them because once you have an appreciation for why it matters it makes it a lot easier for you to want to actually do them. We actually incorporate them into our ATHLEANX training programs in the right balance so that you know that you’re doing things right. That’s over at ATHLEANX. com. In the meantime, if you’ve found this video helpful, if you always like