Fix Your Frozen Shoulder 5&6-Beginner/Intermediate WorkoutsWe

We wrap up the last 2 segments of Fix Your Frozen Shoulder with a beginner and intermediate workout series. These are more like retraining your shoulders on how they’re supposed to move than a true, hard workout. Ultimately, you’d want to be able to do something like hang from a bar or do a pull up. For now, it’s reminding your brain that the ball and socket joint is different from the movement of your shoulder blade.

In the first episode, we first connect the movement of the shoulders to the core (your diaphragm) and then reinforce those movements both lying on your back and on the side. I always try to sequence connections in different planes with gravity because it allows the brain to really understand the movement of a joint. I find that when my clients do this, the brain better remembers the motions and it’s less active mental effort on the client in day-to-day life. We then do an external rotation exercise (shoulder opening) that allows for minimal cheating. If you feel it in your lower back, just back off the range of motion a bit. Next, we return back to the front of the shoulder for a simple pec major strengthener. Lastly, we add a little resistance for the shoulders while doing a big, full motion. It’s easy to cheat this by arching the back and faking the motion, so try to keep your spine as is and focus the movement at the shoulder blades. It may take time, particularly if your spine is stiff.

For the intermediate workout, we fine tune some of the smaller, stability muscles of the shoulders and add a bit more resistance to these motions. Hands down, one of the best investments is a resistance loop. It automatically triggers these small muscles to kick on and is great to add to more complex movements like push ups and pull ups when you get on the other side of a shoulder impingement.

We begin with protraction of the shoulders, the serratus. I refer to these as the ‘Bruce Lee muscles’ because they were so well-defined on him. Then we connect these muscles to the lats in a breaststroke motion. Picking up the theraloop, we do a quick variety of exercises to turn on the delts, subscapularis and triceps. You could easily add dumbells to this. Long before your shoulder pains, your spine had likely tightened up. So, we go through some spinal mobility in forward bending, side bending and then rotation. All of these are gentle in nature, but it gives you the idea that to really heal the impingement, everything is connected and you need to look at your spine, not just your shoulders.

I hope you’ve found this series helpful and that there are ways you can work to self-heal from home! Remember that frozen shoulder often needs an extra pair of hands to help. I’m here as well as any other hands-on practitioner to assist in that process.

Fix Your Frozen Shoulder 4-The Stress Connection

Of all of the common musculoskeletal conditions I’ve worked with, frozen shoulder seems to be the most stress-related one. I say this because as soon as it gets fixed on one side, it almost always moves to the other shoulder. So, to make sure we’re looking at all aspects of how a shoulder impingement happens, we also need to consider the emotional aspect.

I’m not inherently a woo person, but the chakra system has had some interesting overlap with common themes I’ve seen with frozen shoulder over the last decade+. Nearly everyone I’ve worked with who has frozen shoulder, has a lot of tension at the throat and jaw—like they’ve spent time experiencing a situation where they felt stifled from expressing their voice. This could be growing up, a relationship or a work environment. Moving down the chakra system, I see the arms as an extension of the heart with little energy centers in the hands. You may feel this as you hug someone or even pet an animal or touch something soft. And then we have the yellow portion, the solar plexus, which is represented as the career center and center of power/agency/volition. The way I’ve seen this all interplay in frozen shoulder is that there’s an incongruency between what someone feels like they should be doing with their life, their power being taken away, and what their heart knows it wants. The throat area then locks down in a must-do fashion and erego we have a arm/shoulder girdle that gets frozen as stuck as the person feels trapped.

Frozen shoulder is a breath issue. The third chakra area is the diaphragm. The heart and the throat are bisected by the collar bone, which is how the shoulders attach to the body—crazy, right? The shoulders on your back literally float on the back of your ribs (or, they’re supposed to) and the only place they attach in a fixed way to the rest of the skeleton is at the sternum, or heart area. When you breathe, muscles should be lowering and lifting your collar bone to make room so that your rib cage and expand all around, kind of like the opposite of pushing an umbrella open. As this happens, your shoulders should gently move up and to the sides of your back and then settle back down. When this can’t happen, the shoulder girdle gets stuck, and then we have frozen shoulder. So, to help unfreeze the shoulders, we have to open up the breathing muscles.

This video contains 3 opportunities for opening the breath and diaphgram. I offer several variations depending on how much pain you have in shoulder shoulders. Since I love that cupping set, another option you have is cupping along the ribs, stomach and sternum to help open the breath in a way that should be frozen shoulder-friendly.

As you do these exercises, see if any feelings, thoughts or memories come to mind. They may offer an entryway to seeing what you’re holding in this area or things in your life that need to change to make the pain move its way out of you. Don’t forget to breathe. ;)

Fix Your Frozen Shoulder 3-Lateral Fascial Chain

Weak lats are one of the main reasons for shoulder impingements, IMHO. The lats span all the way from the back of the armpit, to the mid-spine down to the lower back—basically the bottom half of your back. They tend to be tight and weak in most adults I’ve encountered. For frozen shoulder, the lats get in this dysfunctional relationship with the pec minor and teres minor. Essentially, having your arms bent in front of you like a T-Rex all day, shortens your pec minor and biceps muscles. Another, very small muscle of the rotator cuff, the teres minor, helps support this pattern through the back of the armpit. The lat, on top of the teres, then becomes stuck in a holding pattern to have your back in this 21st century posture.

Hands down, the best way to release the muscles and fascia of your lateral line re:shoulder impingement is to use a cupping set. Here’s the one I own from Amazon. Use those cups (you can also do a couple pumps and drag along your skin, just make sure to have some coconut oil down first) on your triceps, upper traps, lats and even IT band.

Once you get all that loosened up, this video includes some lateral line stretches. We go over different ways to stretch the lats by changing the position of your arms. Then stretch the lateral aspect of the torso. And then take that down to the IT band. Pay attention if you have a tendency to keep one knee bent ever-so-slightly during this IT stretch—is it on the same side you have the shoulder pain? If you just stand without thinking and look down, is that same foot outside further away from your centerline (think about drawing a line straight down from your zipper)? Or, is it the other leg? These imbalances at the hip can affect whether or not your shoulder feels like it needs to help that side get forward in gait (how you walk) and can be another layer of problem-solving frozen shoulder. I also include a link to some calf and hamstring stretches in this video, as they also encompass the lateral fascial chain.

We then move to activating the lateral hip stabilizers, read: your balance muscles. You want to feel the bulk of this action at the gluteus medius aka the love handle area. Next up is activating the lat itself. The primary action of this muscle is to turn the arm inward and pull it to your side. I demonstrate a way to do this with a theraband. Things to watch out for in this exercise are to make sure that your wrist is in alignment with your forearm and to slowly let the arm release away from your torso so you’re working the lat in a full-range. The last set of muscles we activate in this video are the triceps—I call this my trifecta of triceps. Expect to be a bit sore the next day even if you don’t use any weights.

The content in this video is suuuper important for understanding how a shoulder impingement happens and how to gradually start shifting those tectonic plates of your shoulders and back to correct it at home and for the long haul.

Fix Your Frozen Shoulder 2-Anterior Fascial Chain

This episode focuses on the anterior fascial chain which goes from the thumb and palm of one hand, across the abdomen and down the inner thigh of the opposite leg—read: your obliques! Most adult bodies don’t really remember how to twist correctly, and instead, use their shoulders/neck to twist and not their core oblique muscles. In this video, we’ll massage and stretch all the areas that are overworking and then re-activate the under-working core musculature.

The first place to stretch and massage is the pec minor and major. This area is perhaps the most important for shoulder impingements as these muscles are contracted all day as we type/drive and do anything with our arms held in front of us. Yes, scroll thumb also applies here. There’s also a bicep stretch where your goal is to have your hands behind you with your pinkys touching—a simple towel will do as a prop.

We then travel up the chain to the face and neck for a self-lymphatic face massage. Then tend to muscles in the sides and front of neck that get testy with chronic jaw tension.

Moving downward, we look at using your hand to release your groin—the pesky pectineus as I like to call it, which can mirror the tension in the pec minor. Both of these muscles deeply pull the ball and socket joints inward to the fetal position. So, if you struggle with the hunched position and/or sleep in the fetal position, you’ll want to take some time to do this release with the follow up abdomen stretch to restore some space to your mid-section. You’ll not only feel longer afterward, you’ll probably feel leaner too!

The goal of these videos is not to just stretch and release, but to also remind your brain of what it should be using more. In this case, it’s your obliques. The ‘exercise’ in this video activates those and also emphasizes the eccentric load on your pecs and inner thighs. When we’re tensed into this crunched, poor posture position, we become a little ball with T-Rex arms in the extreme; meaning the pecs and inner thighs are only strong when they’re close to our torso. In this movement, we’re trying to make big motions with these joints to remind those areas they have way more they can do.

And finally, we activate the front of the shoulder (not the chest) as it often is under-utilized. Important cues here are to keep your elbows straight—no T-Rex and to feel like you’re lifting your arms in water, meaning nice and slow. If this motion bugs the shoulder, try a different angle. You can also play with different wrist positions to hit the different aspects of this muscle.

Hope you find these stretches and movements helpful for your shoulder pain!