You have injured your shoulder and you find it hard to do everyday activities especially overhead tasks such as hanging the clothes and grabbing food from the top shelf of the pantry! This shoulder pain makes you compensate and use your unaffected arm. You ask yourself, maybe I’m doing more damage to my shoulder when I use it? You’re unsure about it. Because you are favouring the unaffected arm, your injured shoulder becomes weaker and less resistant to load. You begin to feel an increase of pain in that shoulder and start nonchalantly calling it your ‘bad shoulder’ among your friends. You decide you had enough being miserable about your shoulder and call your physiotherapist.
This is a common scenario we see in our patients! Often there is an issue with our rotator cuff tendons or muscles. This can be in a form of a tendonitis, bursitis or a strain to the rotator cuff. The rotator cuffs are four primary shoulder muscles that help stabilise our shoulder during movement. So how do we make it strong and prevent injury to it? We can make our shoulders stronger through a physiotherapy guided strengthening program that focuses on the rotator cuff muscles. Strong rotator cuff muscles support our shoulder during overhead movements and allow it to tolerate heavier load or for a longer duration.
It usually involves a slow progressive strengthening program. We know that tendons hate change hence if you live a sedentary lifestyle then decide to return to the gym and lift heavy weights then you’re a risking overloading your tendon and injuring it. This can even be a mundane task such as painting your house, its an activity you don’t usually do and it can lead to an overuse tendon injury. Tendons need to be strengthened in a slow and progressive manner.
A Myphysio physiotherapist can help create an individualised shoulder program for you! Whether you’re a professional tennis player that needs a strong shoulder for their serves or you are a weekend warrior that want to prevent injuring your shoulder in your weekly group F45 class, we got you covered! Here is how we do it!
Step 1: We manage your pain and symptoms
Step 2: We dig deeper to find out what is causing your shoulder to irritate. A muscle imbalance issue or a movement issue or sometimes it might not even be a shoulder issue. (Often a referred pain from your neck)
Step 3: We bulletproof your shoulder through addressing the muscle imbalance and optimise your shoulder function.
Book an appointment with our physio to bulletproof your shoulder. We also have an Instagram page to help you stay updated on tips on how to manage common musculoskeletal issues.