Fixing Shoulder Pain. What has worked for you?

GromsDad

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Jan 21, 2014
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Fixing Shoulder Pain. What has worked for you?

Coming off of my second major bout of shoulder pain. In both instances once I found something that worked the pain vanished within a week or two.

Instance number 1 was my left shoulder caused by swinging a golf club with no warmup. Got an instant ice pick stabbing pain. Over time it got worse and worse and really messed me up for about two years. Just kept aggravating it over and over. I was sure I was heading for surgery and just putting off going to the Dr because I hate going to the Dr. One day I stumbled across the YouTube video below. Hanging from a pull up bar. At first I could only tolerate a light pull but it gave me instant relief. Over the course of two weeks of hanging several times a day that shoulder was fixed and it hasn't given me a problem since. I've kept hanging in my routine ever since.


My right shoulder started giving me occasional pain after doing bench press at the gym about six month ago. Also when lifting above my head or doing bench press I was getting a lot of painless clicking and clunking sensations in my shoulder. In February I got caught in the impact zone by a double overhead set at a reef break with no options other than to just duck dive until the set stopped. As I got gassed my technique got sloppy and doing a push up motion to push the nose under I got that familiar ice pick stabbing pain. Finished out the surf trip without issue thanks to Meloxicam. Few days after the trip back in the gym doing bench press with dumbells I got a really good stab in it. This set off about two months of pain especially sleeping. For this one hanging like I'd done before wasn't touching it. About two weeks ago I started doing face pulls at the gym after seeing another video looking for ideas. The relief came quickly like within three gym sessions of focusing on this exercise the shoulder had completely calmed down. The clicking and popping I was getting is 90% gone and still improving and best of all no pain sleeping. I've been setting the weight to do 20 reps of this and then hanging in between sets as the first thing I do when I get to the gym. This week I was back to being able to do pain free bench press and pushups. When I do this exercise I immediately feel my shoulder posture improve into a shoulders back position instead of rounded over.


What else has worked for everyone? Between surfing, golf and fishing all of the hobbies I enjoy require pain free shoulders and I want to stay in the game at least another decade.
 
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One-Off

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Fixing Shoulder Pain. What has worked for you?

Coming off of my second major bout of shoulder pain. In both instances once I found something that worked the pain vanished within a week or two.

Instance number 1 was my left shoulder caused by swinging a golf club with no warmup. Got an instant ice pick stabbing pain. Over time it got worse and worse and really messed me up for about two years. Just kept aggravating it over and over. I was sure I was heading for surgery and just putting off going to the Dr because I hate going to the Dr. One day I stumbled across the YouTube video below. Hanging from a pull up bar. At first I could only tolerate a light pull but it gave me instant relief. Over the course of two weeks of hanging several times a day that shoulder was fixed and it hasn't given me a problem since. I've kept hanging in my routine ever since.


My right shoulder started giving me occasional pain after doing bench press at the gym about six month ago. Also when lifting above my head or doing bench press I was getting a lot of painless clicking and clunking sensations in my shoulder. In February I got caught in the impact zone by a double overhead set at a reef break with no options other than to just duck dive until the set stopped. As I got gassed my technique got sloppy and doing a push up motion to push the nose under I got that familiar ice pick stabbing pain. Finished out the surf trip without issue thanks to Meloxicam. Few days after the trip back in the gym doing bench press with dumbells I got a really good stab in it. This set off about two months of pain especially sleeping. For this one hanging like I'd done before wasn't touching it. About two weeks ago I started doing face pulls at the gym after seeing another video looking for ideas. The relief came quickly like within three gym sessions of focusing on this exercise the shoulder had completely calmed down. The clicking and popping I was getting is 90% gone and still improving and best of all no pain sleeping. I've been setting the weight to do 20 reps of this and then hanging in between sets as the first thing I do when I get to the gym. This week I was back to being able to do pain free bench press and pushups. When I do this exercise I immediately feel my shoulder posture improve into a shoulders back position instead of rounded over.


What else has worked for everyone? Between surfing, golf and fishing all of the hobbies I enjoy require pain free shoulders and I want to stay in the game at least another decade.
It would be interesting to know what the difference was in the injuries (left vs right) to account for the different results from hanging.
 

GromsDad

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Jan 21, 2014
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West of the Atlantic. East of the ICW.
It would be interesting to know what the difference was in the injuries (left vs right) to account for the different results from hanging.
Left shoulder injury was the result of the very end of an outward swinging motion like flinging a frisbee as hard as you can. Right shoulder injury was the result of a bench press type of pushing away motion.
 
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PRCD

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Feb 25, 2020
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Find a good PT. It’s a Wild West show with them though - they’re all over the place, but the really good ones are awesome.
This is really true. Most of them have a very outdated Cartesian understanding of pain and they just give you a bunch of exercises at random.

This looks worth a try.
 
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estreet

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Feb 19, 2021
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I’ve had an impingement in the right shoulder for about two years but it’s almost gone now. Simply hanging for a few minutes a day seems to have done the trick.