Shoulder Injuries

The Rotator Cuff Is The Most Common Cause Of Shoulder Pain

The rotator cuff is formed by a group of tendons and muscles around the shoulder joint.

They ensure that the head of your upper arm is firmly kept within the shallow socket of your shoulder and perform rotational movements through the shoulder.

Due to a rotator cuff injury, you may feel varying degrees of pain from dull ache to sharp stabbing pain.

The mild pain might worsen when you sleep on the affected side.

The muscles and/or tendons can become strained or torn suddenly or this can be a gradual onset.

After an acute event, such as falling on your hand or shoulder, the treatment approach is straightforward.

1. Pain Relief & Optimise Healing through resting & manual treatment techniques
2. Build Back Up Your Strength & Sports Specific Movements

When these injuries come on over time there is a lot more to be done. Finding out why is vital.

Your shoulder has many muscles, and they need to be working in synergy with all of the other shoulder, spinal, arm and hand muscles in order for your shoulder and upper limb to function well.

A kink at any point in this chain can result in a painful shoulder.

This can lead you to being abruptly stopped from doing the activities and sports that are important to you.

Therefore, you need to appropriately strengthen the right muscles, in order to optimize the functionality of the shoulder.

This needs to be assessed so you can focus on the weak areas, rather than blindly trying to work the ones you usually work and digging a bigger hole.

This will cause this potentially vulnerable area to become strong and resilient.

Is It Even My Rotator Cuff?

As mentioned at the start this is the most common issue we see in clinic. However, there can be quite a few other issues going on. To name a few:

Labral Tear
AC Joint Sprain
Biceps Tear / Tendinopathy
Nerve Entrapments
Plus Many More

This is another why getting a comprehensive assessment is vital. To know what is going on, why it happened and what you can do about it.

Struggling With A Shoulder Injury?

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Optimising Training Load is also vitally important.

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