7 Tips For Pain Free Shoulders

Shoulder pain is a common thing for a lot of people out there, and something I’m not stranger to.

I played volleyball for 11 years, and the final two seasons I carried around a right shoulder than barely recovered between weekend fixtures, seriously impacted my weight training and would wake me up in the night if I moved into the wrong position. It was exhausting and the main reason I decided to stop playing at 27. I needed that shoulder for my S&C career which is going to last a lot longer than my athletic career. But what regular gym goers and serious athletes don’t want to do is stop training. Athletes better than I don't stop because it’s actually important and potentially their sole source of income, and the general public because the gym is likely their main source of exercise and something that should improve their health, not damage it. So I’m going to give you some of my best tips for keeping your shoulders pain free whilst you continue to train. 1) Prioritise shoulder mobility Shoulders usually start to hurt when they stop moving well. It’s a pretty easy line to draw between the two. Someone has shoulder pain, assess the shoulder, it doesn’t want to move in a few directions. That’s often the source of the pain. The problem with shoulders to the regular gym goer and athlete is that they are designed to move in a huge variety of ways, but we only load them in a few specific ways. These trained movements get stronger, the untrained movements get weaker, and before you know it you lose access to the untrained movements as you literally don’t have the strength to pull yourself into them. So we counteract this with mobility training, which is a combination of increasing passive range of motion through stretching, and then strengthening that newly acquired range of motion to actually fix the problem. Improve movement, and you’ll likely take a big step towards improving the pain. 2) Mobilise your scapulae The second thing you need to work in are your shoulder-blades, the big flat bones in your upper back that should slide across your ribcage freely. They should protract (spread), retract (pinch), elevate (go up), and depress (go down), and do those in combination with each other (retraction in elevation and depression, and protraction in elevation and depression). The common problem with gym training is that we over-coach one of these, retraction and depression. How many times have you been told to “pull your shoulders back”, “pinch your shoulder blades” or “put your shoulder blades in your back pocket”? A lot more than “push your shoulders in front of your ears” I bet. So once again we get overly strong in one position at the detriment of the other positions, creating potential imbalance and risking pain. In an ideal world, you should have a couple of really freely gliding scapulae that allow you to use your shoulders effectively in a wide variety of positions. Mobilise them the same way as your shoulders, by increasing passive range of motion through stretching, then strengthening that new range of motion. 3) Don’t forget the thoracic spine I’ll move on from mobility in the next tip, but before we move on it’s important to talk about the thoracic spine. The chain of motion goes from shoulders which are positioned by your scapulae, which sit over your ribcage, which is positioned from your thoracic spine. This chain of motion alternates from mobile joint (shoulder), to stable joint (scapulae), to mobile joint (thoracic spine), because if they were all mobile we’d be a wobbly mess, and if they were all stable we would have no movement. So in short, the thoracic spine should be nice and mobile through flexion and extension, and also rotation. Fortunately its column like structure is designed really well for this, but unfortunately our normal lives of being slumped in thoracic flexion all day isn’t. So if you can’t extend your thoracic spine, you’ll likely not be able to lift and open your chest to push effectively overhead, or pull from overhead either. If this is the case overhead presses and pull-ups/chin-up will likely start giving your shoulders issues as the next mobile joint in the chain tries to compensate for the lack of movement in your spine. To work on this extension I would actually start with thoracic rotation drills, as if your spine can rotate it’ll very likely extended, but if it can extend it won’t necessarily be able to rotate (if that makes sense?). It’s more bang for buck and a quicker route to thoracic spine health. 4) Train using full ranges of motion So simple concept, once you’ve created all the mobility you need, you need to continue to use it, or you’ll end up right back where you started. That firstly means full range of motion on bench presses, overhead presses and pull-ups like we know we should (but don’t always do, especially pull-ups), and secondly means incorporating accessory exercises that allow full range of motion through our scaps and thoracic too, especially in rows and presses. Pinch, spread, elevate and depress the scaps, flex, extend and rotate the thoracic regular with appropriate load. Keep everything moving, keep everything happy. Dumbbells, kettlebells and the landmine are all great accessory tools which can be used to create freedom of movement away from the heavy barbell. Just don’t go back to solely flattening your scaps to the bench for heavy bench presses and pushing them into your back pockets for squats and deads every session and expecting things to go well… but that being said… 5) … Always create a stable base When you ARE loading the shoulders, you MUST ensure they are safe by creating a stable base because as I said right at the start they designed to be very mobile. High mobility + High load = Likely big whoopsies. When pressing heavy on a bench or military press for example, you need to create high stability around your very mobile shoulder joint by using your upper back, lats, and lower body to fix your upper body in place. This is why an arch in your bench press is essential if you want to pursue heavy loads (and it’s not even a discussion anymore). This is where “shoulders back and down” as a cue DOES come in, and is appropriate, because it’ll bring your shoulders into a bigger and more stable structure rather than having to fend for themselves away from the safety of the rest of your body. 6) Know your push to pull ratio The wording of this is important. Knowing YOUR push to pull ration is important, not pursuing a generic push to pull ratio. A push to pull ration is essentially how many pushing movements you do against how many pulling movements you do. People will often recommend a 1:1 push to pull ratio (so one pull for every push, perfectly balanced as all things should be). BUT, that will only be effective if you already have balance, and if you have shoulder pain, you likely don’t have balance. So someone new to coaching, with very poor posture, who’s done loads of push-ups and abs at home between sitting at their desk, but nothing for the non-mirror muscles will likely have a lot of work to be done on their back muscles compared to their pressing muscles, so a 1:2 push/pull ratio could be more appropriate. As it often does, #ItDepends, which is why it is important to know YOUR ideal push to pull ratio, and not just ignore it. Keeping aware and focussed on it is key, with an aim of a 1:1 push/pull ratio being appropriate for you being a good long term target. 7) Don’t forget your external rotators Finally, we need to train our shoulder external rotators often to balance out the work I can guarantee you’re doing on your internal rotators. The big and frequently training internal rotators are the pec major, pec minor and lats. Yes, the lats on your back can negatively internally rotate your shoulders as they originate along your mid to lower spine, and importantly insert on the underside of the front of your upper arm (which will rotate it inwards). Balancing our your push/pull ration with heavy lat work might not actually fix your issues, it could contribute further. As such, we need to guarantee that we externally rotate the shoulder with specific exercises such as external rotations (shocking I know), face pulls and band forks. Basically when you’re told to train your rotator cuff, this is what it means. Sometimes this can all seem a bit confusing and a bit much to implement into your program, so if you’re struggling to rid yourself of shoulder pain I would 100% recommend hiring a coach, and this is something I’ve got a lot of experience in. So don’t forget, if you want my help with this you can apply for coaching here, or I can work on a program for you to work on your specific issues here. Thanks, Ian.