Shoulder Pain? We’ve Got You Covered!
Shoulder pain or shoulder degeneration comes in different forms – here we discuss them in some more detail and offer the solution(s).
Most of you at some point would have suffered from at least one or more of the most common shoulder pain inducing pathologies such as; frozen shoulder, pinching pain when lifting overhead, rotator cuff issues, bursitis, catching, clicking, grinding, asymmetry, pain or weakness down the arms etc.
Having healthy shoulders is important for general health and not just for the athletic minded or enthusiast. We need to be able to raise our arms overhead to carry out everyday tasks such as reaching for food items, changing clothes and so on. Of course this can become difficult and even distressing when we encounter shoulder pain. Although the pain will be felt in and around the shoulder(s) we find that the cause of this is often elsewhere in your body. Read on to learn why.
Common Solutions for Common Problems Don’t Always Work
Most often the shoulder pain experienced is muscular in nature i.e. overly tense or overworked muscles in the shoulder. Common advice that follows for such a problem would usually be to stretch and/or massage the offending muscles followed by mobilizing and strengthening said muscles.
Although this can help somewhat for some people it is not tackling the underlying problem and in some cases can even make things worse. For instance pulling your shoulders back all the time to stop your shoulders rounding makes your back arch, eventually leading to poorer biomechanics in that area and poorer breathing. Extended and heavily repeated stretching as per the picture can lead to weakness around the scapula and result in ‘scapula winging’ and may even result in future injury.
Correctly Identify the Problem with Shoulder Pain
As we stated earlier the root of your shoulder pain is not always the shoulder itself. Often the start of the pathology is somewhere else in the body therefore the shoulder pain is the side-effect of that primary breakdown. In other words, a problem in one place can cause problems elsewhere.
Let’s examine the posterior anatomy here; Shoulder muscles attach from the top of your arm to the neck, mid-back, lower back, and ribs. They all work together as a single-functional unit, a kinetic chain. That said, if one area is not operating properly, the other areas immediately get affected too.
Commonly, the upper/mid part of your spine gets misaligned through injury or trauma. Eventually it becomes either twisted, too rounded, flat or even stuck in a reverse curve as your body attempts to compensate around it the best it can. This misalignment becomes the cause of many shoulder issues and needs correcting or the shoulder never gets better. In fact, as the entire body itself works as a single kinetic chain, any biomechanical issue(s) can affect any other part(s) of your body.
Concurrently lower back misalignments can also indirectly result in shoulder pain and shoulder related issues. Commonly, this looks like your lower back is over-arching, your pelvis will tilt forward, your lower abdomen will stick out and your knees will lock out into extension. In order to stabilize the area, a big muscle called latissimus dorsi (lat for short) can get very tight and this disturbs normal shoulder motion as it will overpower all the other muscles.
You can test this quickly for yourself. Setup as per the picture so that your backside, heels and head are against a flat wall. Raise your arms so that the backs of your hands touch the wall at around head height or so. If you can’t touch the wall with the backs of your hands without really arching your back or at all then obviously you have shoulder mobility issues. Some of you may even have to resort to overly reaching forward with your head or shrugging and pinching your shoulder blades to engineer the room/mobility required to execute the movement. In short you will have difficulty and/or discomfort in doing this properly.
When faced with this, most people take the wrong approach and work on this issue by strengthening, stretching, massaging, foam rolling, taping, etc. This does not fix the problem as the lat(s) will keep contracting until the lower back is re-aligned. In actuality foam rolling on your spine makes the whole situation worse in the long run as it pushes the spine vertebrae further forward out of alignment!
Instead what must be done is for all biomechanical pathologies to be identified and corrected using a full body correction method. At Body Centric Wellness we employ such a method – Advanced BioStructural Correction™ (ABC™).
Correctly Treat Shoulder Pain
The position of your shoulders is linked to the position of your top-most ribs. Your 1st ribs. Rounded shoulders is often accompanied with a collapsed or compressed chest, making breathing more difficult and blood circulation poorer.
The ABC™ method we use can reset and correct the position of your 1st ribs so that your shoulders immediately move back towards their neutral position and stay there with no effort required from you. We don’t stop there. We also correct the position of any other bones in the body that are contributing to the crookedness. This ultimately improves your posture and massively improves shoulder motion and comfort – allowing you to relax and stop holding your shoulders.
Not only will your shoulders get reset and corrected we also help alleviate any compression of your chest and reduce the active muscle involvement required in your breathing so you can start breathing better and easier. In addition to this your nerves will begin to function better as we reduce spinal cord tension as well as nerve tension overall. We can help you achieve all this without any exercises, stretching, painful massage, taping, needles, surgery, and so on.
A key point to remember is that posture is passive, therefore if you are having to set your shoulders i.e. actively pull them back, you are not addressing the cause and simply unnecessarily wasting energy, changing the normal movement pattern and reducing spinal mobility. With ABC™ care most people will notice an immediate and significant difference in shoulder position and mobility from the first correction!
As you continue with the treatment plan and progress through your journey of recovery, you can quickly return to activities and performing exercises you would have been avoiding and make serious gains now that your body functions more like it should.
Ultimately, the entire body ends up working great, feeling light and without complaint. Wouldn’t you like your body to do the same? Our goal is to help you get back to health and be the best you can be. Let us get to the root cause of your ailment(s). We offer a FREE consultation including a demo of the ‘First Rib Manoeuver’ before you decide on proceeding with any treatment. You will feel the difference to your pain and movement right from the off.