If you're experiencing shoulder pain, it's time to overhaul your training routine. Ignoring that signal and pushing through the pain could lead to missed time at the gym, a serious injury, and even surgery.
But what's the best way to improve your workout? Should you ditch the shoulder exercises until the pain goes away?
Rest is rarely enough: it's just a quick fix. Chances are, once you resume your old workout routine, the pain will come back—maybe even worse.
The Three Pillars of Shoulder Health
To fix nagging shoulder pain, always follow these rules:
Stop doing exercises that irritate the shoulders.
Get the shoulders to sit in the right position.
Get the shoulders to move properly.
The shoulders are a fragile area and should be trained as such. In the shoulder joint, there's a tiny gap for your arms to move around called the "subacromial space"—that space should always be maintained.
Yet for many with shoulder pains, their posture and exercise routine closes that space, inflames nearby muscles and ligaments, and creates pain.
In the shoulder girdle, the shoulder blades (scapula) also have an important role—as you reach up, they rotate upward; as you return, they rotate downward.
Shoulder pain starts developing when the scapula doesn't move as well due to injuries, bad posture, and poor training.
To fix your cranky shoulders, you need to find good replacement exercises, improve your posture, and move better. Here are eleven great tips (in no particular order) that will get you feeling great again.
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Do More Pulling Than Pushing
Most guys do way more pushing than pulling—we focus so much on chest exercises, but forget about heavy rows and pulls. This creates an imbalance because chest gets stronger and stiffer than your back muscles. Over time, your shoulders slump forward and your arms to turn inward.
This posture wrecks your shoulders: now, they're not in the right position, they won't move properly, and—when you do something as simple as reach overhead—the joints will get impinged.
Do twice as many pulling exercises than pushing and strengthen the muscles in your upper back. Focus on pulling your shoulder blades down and back throughout the exercise to encourage good posture.
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Stop Benching, Switch to Pushups
When you do target your chest, use push-ups. Exercises like the bench press lock your shoulder blades in place as you push, which is not how the area should function.
Push-ups, however, let the scapula move freely, which improves shoulder health. They also strengthen shoulder-stabilizing muscles like the serratus anterior, which is often weak and inactive.
Too easy? Put your feet on a bench, add some weight to your back, or try it on an unstable surface.
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Open Pecs with Soft Tissue Work
Because of imbalances in the upper-body (a strong chest and weak back), the chest muscles tend to get stiff and short, which yanks your shoulders forward. Therefore, you need to lengthen the chest muscles, build good posture, and let the shoulders sit properly again.
But stretching isn't enough. Often, the muscles in the chest get dense and fibrotic, and just don't want to cooperate. Instead, you'll need to use "soft-tissue work" to massage the muscles, break up the gunk, and restore muscle quality.
Use a lacrosse ball or tennis ball to dig into the pecs. (You might find a painful surprise.) After opening the muscle, your pecs will be susceptible to stretching, and you can restore its natural length.
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Open Your Thoracic Spine
Reach your right hand overhead and down your back as far as you can while reaching your left hand up your back as far as possible.
Can you touch your hands together? Are you even close? If not, it's more than just your shoulders that are tight—your thoracic spine is stiff.
The thoracic spine (T-spine) is the area around your mid- to upper-back that's built for mobility. When it becomes tight, it limits your shoulders and cause shoulder pain.
To open the T-spine, try exercises like:
Cat-Camel
Side Lying Diagonal Reach
T-Spine Extension on a Foam Roller
Quadruped T-Spine Extension
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Switch to Dumbbells
(Or anything where you can twist your hands—cables, suspension trainers, etc. are all good choices.) When you use barbells and machines, your hands can't rotate, and it forces your shoulders into unnatural positions, which puts a lot of stress on the joints. Instead, use exercises that allow your arms to twist naturally.
Which directions? On your right hand, you should go clockwise as you pull and counterclockwise as you push.
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Strengthen Your External Rotators
Stand up and let your arms relax. Where do your palms face? At each other? Toward your hips? Directly behind you?
Chances are, your palms aren't facing each other. That means your arms "internally rotate"—twist inward with your palms facing backward—and create an impingement at your shoulder joint. To open the sacred subacromial space, strengthen the opposite motion by targeting the muscles that externally rotate your arms.
Try exercises like:
Band no-money drill
Cable external rotations
Reverse flyes
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Fire Your Lower Traps
The lower traps are often overlooked, yet critical in getting your shoulders to sit the right position, encourage good posture, and allow for clean movement in your shoulder blades.
Because of the way the lower traps aim—known as "pennation"—they're activated when you make a Y-shape with your arms. Strengthen your lower traps with exercises like:
Scapular wall slides
Prone Ys
Wide-grip pulldowns
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Don't Forget Your Lats
Much like the pecs, they need to be targeted with soft-tissue work and stretched too. Don't say I didn't warn you—this hurts.
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Retrain Proper Movement
For people with shoulder problems, they may need to relearn how to lift overhead and fire the right muscles at the right time. It seems simple, but trainees often struggle with these exercises because they're not used to correct movement.
Try an exercise like the reach, roll, and lift. Although tedious, building the correct movement pattern at the shoulders is critical to preventing injuries and reducing pain.
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Switch to High-incline
Pushing directly overhead can be rough on the shoulders if you have a history of pain. Instead, set an adjustable bench to a high-incline and do your overhead exercises there. You still can add a lot of muscle to your upper-body, yet spare the joint at the same time.
Switch to high-incline overhead presses or high-incline lat pulldowns.
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Open Your Hips
Fact: your hips and shoulders are linked. If, for example, you have a tight left hip, you'll typically also have a tight right shoulder because of the cross-connections in your torso.
This is an overlooked element to shoulder health. Pain isn't only caused by that particular joint—sometimes, the problem starts elsewhere and travels to the weakest link. (It makes sense that your shoulders would hurt: they're the most mobile joints in the body.)
Improve your hip mobility and your shoulders will follow.
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