Description
Your shoulder feels better... for about three weeks. Then it's right back.
I hear a version of this sentence almost every week from athletes and lifters who've already "done the rehab."
The rehab?
Resistance band external rotations.
Pull-aparts.
I's, T's, Y's
I call this "The standard"... Its the boiler plate rehab exercise selection.
It's not that any of those exercises are bad per se,
it's that they're answering maybe a third of the question.
Here's the part most shoulder programs skip entirely....
the shoulder isn't one joint.
It's a girdle.
The rib cage, the shoulder blade, and the ball-and-socket joint all have to share the workload of every overhead motion.
Train the cuff in isolation and ignore the other two, and you're not fixing the problem, just trying to upgrade the capacity to tissue already being over leveraged.
Kinda like wrapping duct tape on a leaky pipe.
That's usually what "impingement" actually is.
Not a damaged tissue.
More like a traffic jam...
the GH joint sacrificing stability to chase motion it should be getting somewhere else.
When I build a real shoulder program, there are three non-negotiable pieces I like to consider.
Breathing and thoracic spine mobility.
The rib cage has to expand and rotate before the shoulder blade has anywhere to go.
Scapular delivery.
The blade needs to glide freely on the rib cage instead of getting muscled into position.
GH joint control and strength. This is where most programs start — and it should be where they finish. Cuff work only does its job once the rib cage and scapula are pulling their weight.
Most shoulder rehab is genuinely incomplete.
Athletes and lifters get handed low-level band work that doesn't challenge anything, doesn't change anything, and leaves them stuck in pain they shouldn't still be dealing with.
If you've "done the exercises" and you're still not better, the exercises probably weren't the problem. The load and sequencer were.
Have you ever done months of shoulder rehab that never actually fixed anything? What did it miss?
Tag a lifter stuck in the band-exercise loop right now.
The Movement Underground | Seaford, NY