A shoulder impingement is one of the most common diagnoses that is out there. It often means that we don’t know what is really going on. Diagnosing it is very tricky, and even an MRI often does not show the whole story.
The rotator cuff consists of four muscles, the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis. The name rotator cuff is pretty misleading. Yes, those muscles do rotate the arm in the joint in their isolated action, but they primarily stabilize the ball of the humerus in the socket throughout its movement.
What does this mean for my training
It means that training the rotator cuff should not be done solely by exercises like external-, internal- rotations but should work on a more functional scale. Don’t get me wrong, those exercises are still good to train the muscle but we want to enable the same muscle to perform through a multitude of motions & planes.
This is crucial because our daily life actions do not consist of isolated rotational exercises but of picking heavy things up and moving in a multi-planar field.
Exercises that can lend themselves to shoulder stability:
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Deadlift: Even though this exercise is designed to train your posterior muscle chain there is some hard work in those shoulders going on. If done correctly your rotator cuff, in combination with lats and pecs provide the necessary stiffness in the joint to do a great deadlift.
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Farmer’s Walks: You have to constantly counterbalance the movement of your torso while carrying weight. It is a great tool to help with shoulder stability.
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Turkish Get Up: This is for the advanced. The amount of control necessary to perform a turkish get up is insane. A great way of teaching it, is by breaking the movement up into its individual parts.
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One Hand Kettlebell Walks: Instead of doing a farmer’s walk lift a kb (bottom up) over your head and stabilize it while walking across the room.
Conclusion
This is just a small selection of exercises that can help you “train” your rotator cuff. The work is definitely not finished by doing rotational exercises alone. Strength does not mean functionality or vice versa. A strong rotator cuff that might have a dysfunctional activation pattern can be just as bad as a weak one.
Personal Note
Being social during your training is great, but I doubt that you are really paying attention to your movement, or working hard enough if you are cable of holding a conversation. Focus on doing your exercise right. Your shoulder, back, hips and knees, or any other joint for that matter will thank you by delivering great performances over the course of your training life.
Have an awesome day,
Michael
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