How to Fix Shoulder Pain & Impingement (FOREVER)

If you have shoulder pain when you lift weights or simply lift your arms up over your head, then you’ll want to watch this video. Here I’m going to show you how to fix shoulder pain and impingement forever by attacking the issue at the root cause and giving you the right rotator cuff exercises and p

What’s up, guys? Jeff Cavaliere. Athleanx. com. Here I am with Jesse’s replacement, Raymond.

So much better. Today we’re going to talk about  shoulder pain and impingement. And the fact is, guys, you might be doing something right now to  try to get rid of the pain that you get whenever you raise your arm up overhead or that pinch that  you get. But if you’re not doing it all the way, doing everything you need to be doing, then you  might still be dealing with this and you’re kind of getting frustrated and wondering why. So I’m  going to show you what you need to do to finally get rid of this once and for all.

But it always  starts here with a little bit of anatomy because we want to see what we’re talking about. When  we’re talking about impingement, we’re talking about a muscle here most almost all the time  the supraspinatus, which is one of the rotate cuff muscles, that sits in this space here, okay? It comes underneath this space, which I’ll show you over here, gets pretty damn crowded and it  attaches to the arm up at the top here. All right, so when we get impingement, when we raise it  up, this structure here can— and I can say can get pinched— because it’s not always  the cause, okay? It can get pinched in here, which causes inflammation of the tendon, pain,  and then a cascade of other things that become problematic whenever you go to lift and push your  arms up overhead.

You can see how crowded it is, as I said. You have a ligament here, the  coracoacromial ligament, that creates some space. You have a bursa that sits under there. And then  the tendon’s supposed to run and fit underneath there. It’s not very roomy, okay?

So when we  have impingement we have problems. But the second thing— and this is what leads to really this long  term cure— is it’s not always coming from the actual pinching of the tendon from the top down. What can also happen is you get a compression of the tendon from the bottom up. All right, so that  means that if this tendon’s here, and I were to internally rotate, you start to get this bending  of the ligament over the bone. More importantly, you can see it when you bring your arm up across  your body, you see how it kind of gets bent around the corner, okay?

As it gets bent around that  corner, that becomes problematic because there’s a lot of tension there. To see that better, we  look at this. If I were to demonstrate this, let’s say this is the arm at the shoulder, and  this is the supraspinatus tendon. And I have a load on this, so I push my foot in it. This would  be simulating a weight in your hand.

The load right here is being directed straight down. But as  I go and I bring the arm across the chest, right, or I go into internal rotation, or I do both  of them, look what happens as I start to wind this up. As I start to wind that up and across  my body, you could see all the compression now that’s underneath this band at this point. That’s  impacting this tendon from the bottom up, causing inflammation, causing breakdown, causing tears. These are the problems.

So if you’re not just addressing creating more room, you got to be able  to address getting your body more accommodated to this stress because this is going to happen. Your  arms are going to go across your body. They’re going to do it whenever you workout. They’re going  to do it in a way that, especially even chest work is going to go, and become a component of that  induction that we talk about all the time. It’s a good thing.

But you have to be used to that or  it causes this inflammation down the road. So what do we do? So we have a couple things. Number one:  if you took a band here and you wanted to work on improving your external rotation strength, which  is critical, and I build it into all my programs because I believe it’s that important to do. All  of us need to be doing work for our rotator cuff strength.

All right, so if I were to go and  take this band and anchor it, your progression would be the following. You would want to make  sure that you started with something very easy, which is an isometric contraction. So I just hold  this. Right, just step out just a little bit, and hold it. I’m firing up the rotator cuff, that  tendon, the supraspinatus tendon is working to try to stabilize this position, and I go for sets  of ten seconds, five seconds, ten seconds.

Right, and I work on this about three or four times aw  eek, maybe three to five sets. As you’re able to handle that, which you probably will pretty  quickly because that’s not a really high stress, then I would start to try to get into the  concentric of it. So now I take my hand across the body and I do these external rotation exercises. You’ve probably seen them before. You’ve certainly seen them if you’ve been watching our channel.

This is concentrically now shortening that tendon, that supraspinatus muscle, and we’re working  on the rotator cuff strength. Now, realize, as I improve my rotator cuff strength, I’m going  to be able to have that shoulder sit in a more externally rotated position. When your shoulder’s  more externally rotated, just in standing all the time, you have more freedom to move your arm up  overhead. The reason for that is the following. Because this bony structure that that tendon  attaches to, when we’re in internal rotation, and I raise it up, it actually gets stopped.

There’s a  bony block. And I’ve shown you guys how to do that before, literally turn your arm in like this,  and then raise it up over your head. It’s only going to get so far. Turn your arm into external  rotation, it’s going to get much further. Because you’re clearing this bony bump from instead of  banging it into the stop here, you turn it out, now it can go all the way up, and the arm can  come way up over your body.

So that is in and of itself going to help to create more room, but  that’s not why we’re really doing this. Why we’re doing it is because we have to get accommodated  to that overload, that tension and compression that’s happening that I talked about on that bar. So, from there now we’re like, All right, let’s start getting it into that internally rotated  position under load, under eccentric stress, okay. So what we do is now we take it here we take  a little bit of a step. So now it wants to pull me back here.

Eccentrically I have to control that. All right, and I come back, and now this is the level that I’m working at. And I still do this in  my three to five sets three times a week. Then I say, All right, let’s get that heavier eccentric  load. Let’s go a little bit further than that.

Because ideally we want to introduce heavy,  even dynamic loads eccentrically, to be able to be able to accommodate those tendons to the  stress. So now I take a bigger step and I let it kind of go here slowly. And I take a bigger  step. Again, not allowing it to simply whip me into internal rotation, I’m controlling it into  internal rotation. And the final step is you go for those plyometric type loads, and these apply  to a lot of different tendon issues.

Down in the Achilles tendon, other places in the elbow,  we want to make sure that what we do is we get ourself to the point where we can accommodate  more dynamic ballistic loads. So I have it here, and then I step out that way, and again, I slowly  bring it back. In here and back. In here and back. Set it in here and back.

So that’s where you  get to. When you’re able to get to that level two things happen. Number one: you will experience  a lot less pain and discomfort in your shoulder. Number two: you won’t have to do that three times  a week. You only ha