A Successful Rotator Cuff Repair is Often Down to the Right Exercise

A rotator cuff tear is one of the commonest shoulder injuries. Nearly 8 million Americans will go to their doctor concerning shoulder pain this year and somewhere around 60% of them will have managed to damage their rotator cuff muscles. Some will need corrective surgery but most of them will manage to repair their shoulder simply by doing exercises designed to work on the rotator cuff an often neglected group of muscles.

So why are these muscles so important and why are they so easily injured? Okay, let's just imagine your shoulder joint as a soccer ball resting on a plate. Your shoulder is a ball and socket joint in some ways it is similar to your hip. The main difference between the two joints is that in the shoulder the socket of the joint is very shallow, so the analogy of a ball on a plate is fairly accurate.

The shallow socket gives the joint the wide range of movemement that we enjoy but at a cost. It is relatively easy for the ball to slip out of the socket. So the rotator cuff muscles are there to hold the ball of the upper arm in place as we move. Without them it would be incredibly easy to dislocate the shoulder. They are four small muscles that attach to the shoulder blade before attaching to the upper arm bone surrounding the shoulder joint in a cuff of muscle, hence the name . These muscles stabilise the shoulder, holding the arm in place and they only really get used to any extent when we lift our arms above our shoulders.

As we age the muscles start to weaken through lack of use, but we tend to be unaware of this until we ask them to do something. Throwing a ball with the kids, playing golf, reaching up for something or lifting something above our heads, all of these movements put a sudden strain on our rotator cuff and can cause problems.

Apart from day to day wear and tear we can also injure the cuff with repetitive movements. Baseball pitchers will often damage their rotator cuff, if your work means constantly reaching up you can do the same, shelf stackers working above shoulder height are putting strain on these muscles every time they lift a can or bottle.

As we are not aware of our rotator cuff it is not an easy group of muscles to exercise, but because weakness in these muscles is a main cause of shoulder injuries, exercising and strengthening them is often the way back to full fitness.

But first, you need to rest. Allow the muscles to heal by resting them. Trying shoulder exercises soon after an injury is simply going to lead to a worse injury. You cannot work through a rotator cuff problem, you need to rest it and let it heal, doing passive non load bearing exercises to keep the joint moving for two or three weeks. Avoid any movement that causes pain. By all means take some anti-inflammatory drugs and pain killers but be careful of using your shoulder if you are masking the pain as you can do more harm than good.

When the muscles have started to mend you can start specific exercises aimed at developing and strengthening the rotator cuff muscles. These will always be exercises with little or no weight or resistance. Try to avoid any pain during exercise as this suggests that you are damaging the muscle not strengthening it.

The majority of rotator cuff problems can be fixed with exercise alone but if you are in the small minority that need surgery you will still need to exercise these muscles after surgery as part of the treatment and to avoid future injuries.

Look after your shoulders, both of them, not just the one that has let you down.

If you want to know what rotator cuff rehab helped me to fix my shoulder without surgery check out my story at

http://www.strongershoulders.com