Feeling a pinch in your shoulder or a sharp pain throughout your upper arm?
Yikes. We’ve been there.
Let’s talk about why you might have some shoulder or neck issues.
When your shoulder gets irritated, three things happen.
- Guarding
Naturally, as humans, we don’t like pain, so we end up trying to guard it. When your peck gets tight, it pulls your shoulder forward.
- Elevation
On the other side of that, if you use your upper trap muscle, that elevates it and you’re walking around with a raised, tight trap.
- Deltoid guarding
Deltoid pain on the side of your shoulder feels like someone is punching you. Imagine you make a fist, and your knuckles turn white because there’s no blood supply.
When you’re guarding a muscle like your deltoid, you ache because there’s no blood supply.
What we want to do is hit the reset button on this process when you’re experiencing shoulder pain.
In order to start alleviating some of these symptoms and put yourself in a better postural position and get stronger, we want to use the lower trap.
The fibers in your lower trap can pull the shoulder blade down and in. We want to use these more.
When the fibers in your lower trap start pulling up, that’s when you start feeling tension. You start getting tension headaches at the back of your head and behind the eyes, and many other issues.
We see this ALL of the time at Physio Room. People are referred in with shoulder issues and it’s really a neck issue. Or vice versa.
It’s not always a cookie cutter issue, and there are SPECIFICS to your own body. Not all shoulder and neck pain is created equal.
Now, let’s talk about the rotator cuff.
When people have rotator cuff issues, the space between their humerus and scapula bones get smaller, and the supraspinatus muscle gets pinched.
When this happens, we see syndromes like impingement syndrome or uncomfortable rubbing to a breaking point.
Surgeons might shave the bone, but one of the BEST things that you can do is strengthening your rotator cuff.
If you combine this rotator cuff strength with pulling your lower trap DOWN and IN, your upper trap gets less tight and you’ll see less irritation and dysfunction in that zone.
The goal here is to set your body up into a better postural position.
Surgery, drugs and injections are not necessarily the answer here. You can avoid that by catching this pain early on!
View our full YouTube video tutorial here to learn more about these muscles, bones, and how to navigate this shoulder and neck pain issue.
If you have questions or want to learn more, give us a call at 720.316.9974.
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