Simple SHOULDER Tips to Keep You Injury Free

SIMPLE SHOULDER TIPS TO KEEP YOU INJURY FREE

Shoulder injures have been by far the most common complaint to our Physiotherapists in the last month. We are unsure of the reason, maybe its the start of footy season, who knows. Here's a review of some simple ways of keeping your workouts shoulder friendly.

1. Limit Overhead Exercises

Many gym training programs involve extensive overhead pressing movements – however from our experience they are often over-rated and can lead to shoulder issues. There is nothing wrong with doing some shoulder presses but make sure you do not do them from the behind the neck position and don’t do more than one overhead pressing movement in each shoulder based workout.

2.    Watch the Range on your Dumbbell Bench Pressing

I have often told trainers and clients to not let the elbows drop below the level of the torso when doing exercises like a Dumbbell Bench Press- whilst it is inviting to use this increased range the risks to your shoulders are often not worth the potential problems. To be safe  imagine you are benching on a flat floor and your elbows cannot go past your body anyway – not a bad analogy and certainly much safer than low pressing.

3.    Balance Your Workouts

Make sure you always do some wide rowing exercises to balance your bench pressing. Do some wider pull downs to balance your shoulder pressing and also include some work on the small rotator cuff muscles to make sure all the areas are looked after.

4.    Beware of Overload

It is easy to overload our small shoulder stabilizers, especially if you are doing hard gym training 3-4 times a week. The small rotator cuff muscles are easily fatigued if you do chest on one day, shoulder on another, and back on another day. Even though it seems that you are only doing shoulder exercises on one day, the actual shoulder muscles are involved in all of these workouts. Add in some tennis, swimming or throwing activities and your small stabilizers are in real trouble.

If you are having trouble with your Shoulders then contact our clinic on (03) 5174 7250 and our physio team will do our best to get you back to full “pain free” function and keep you there.

By Devon Soutar - Physiotherapist