Exercises For Rotator Cuff Injuries That Fixed My Shoulder
November 13th, 2009 | Published in Sexual Health
If only I had found out about exercises for rotator cuff injuries earlier.
Towards the end of last year I managed to tear my left rotator cuff. It is easily done, I am surprised that I have not done it before. Around a third of us of us will manage to injure the rotator cuff at some time in their lives. It is one of the commonest injuries. Eight million Americans will acquire a damaged shoulder this year alone.
What I did was to lift something awkwardly. It was flat packed furniture for my home office and I tried lifting the desk taking all the weight on my left hand and steadying with my right. Because of the weight and shape my left arm was completely straight so all the weight was on my shoulder. I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder, put the furniture down, gave my shoulder a rub where it hurt and didn’t think about it again until the next day.
I had managed to tear, which is one of the rotator cuff muscles. This had resulted in a shoulder impingement that was causing pain each time that I tried lifting my arm above shoulder height, or reaching for anything, or reaching behind me, or lying on it, or…Get the picture?
The pain got worse over the next couple of weeks as I tried to carry on. I now know that this was not the right thing to do. Trying to carry on with a rotator cuff problem will simply lead to a worse injury which is exactly what happened in my case.
By the time that I went to the doctor after two weeks, I had damaged my rotator cuff badly enough to need surgery. To cut a long story short, the doctor tried anti-inflammatory drugs, steroid injections and a few other things to try to bring down the swelling and free up the impinged tendon, all without success. It was after that he decided that surgery would be best.
By now, three months had gone by and I was getting quite bored with being in pain whenever I tried moving my arm, so rather than wait another three months for surgery (UK waiting time on the NHS) I began to look into rotator cuff injuries on line and found out that the majority rotator cuff problems are sorted out without resorting to surgery.
The key is to rest the shoulder properly, which ,if I am honest, I probably hadn’t done. It is hard to completely rest a shoulder because you use them without thinking. What you do need to do is avoid any movement that causes pain as this is an indication that you are doing more damage.
Deal with the swelling at the same time and hopefully the shoulder will start to free up and become less painful.
Once it has you can start exercising the shoulder to strengthen the rotator cuff. These will not be weight bearing exercises but tend to be more Pilates style exercises working on flexibility and control. As the muscle gets stronger you can then start more resistance based exercises, but even then they will not use any great weights because the rotator cuff muscles are small and not load bearing muscles.
If only I had known then what I know now I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble, not to mention pain.
As it is, my surgery date has come and gone. I cancelled because my shoulder was back to full pain free movement without going under the knife, and I now do about ten minutes of exercises for rotator cuff injuries every day.
If you want to know what injuries helped me to fix my shoulder without surgery check out my story at Article Source: