Fast shoulder pain relief with 5 physical therapy exercises

To fully understand why our treatment plan works so well, you’ll have to understand the anatomy and functionality of your shoulder.

Your shoulder forms by your forearm and your shoulder blade. Your shoulder blade lies on your ribcage, which is connected to your spine.

When you lift your arm, your shoulder blade rotates and moves up over your rib cage. Your rib cage and spine have to rotate a little bit to enable your shoulder blade to rotate. If this doesn’t happen, the muscles that connect to your forearm will be compressed within your shoulder, which causes shoulder pain. They are called your rotator cuff muscles.

Also read: Shoulder bursitis symptoms and treatment with 2 exercises

To treat your shoulder pain successfully, you’ll have to improve every part of the chain that moves when you move your shoulder.

The first thing you can do to relieve your pain is to apply this anti-inflammatory cream to the painful spot on your shoulder. It helps exceptionally well with front shoulder pain. This type of shoulder pain is often caused by tendinitis of one of your rotator cuff muscles. The cream reduces the inflammatory process and reduces your pain.

Together with that, you’ll have to improve the mobility of your neck and upper back and train the essential muscles that move and stabilize your shoulders.

The mobility of your neck influences the mobility of your shoulder. Also stiffness of your neck muscles and shoulder muscles influences your shoulder pain.

By stretching your neck and shoulder muscles and improving the strength of your neck and shoulder muscles you’ll feel fast shoulder pain relief.

So let’s start with the first exercise:

The first thing you have to improve is the mobility of your neck. A stiff neck reduces the movements of your shoulder significantly. That’s one of the reasons why neck pain and shoulder pain often occur together.

When you can improve the mobility of your neck, you’ll see an immediate decrease in your shoulder pain. That’s because the compression of the rotator cuff muscles reduces directly due to the improved mobility.

Perform the exercise like this:

Wrap a towel around your neck

• Take with your left hand the right side of the towel and with your right hand the left side
• Now lift the hand that is in front up until the towel is at the same height as your cheek
• Now pull with your arm and the towel your head in the full rotation to the side
• Repeat this ten times and then change to the opposite side by changing your hands
• Finally, grasp the towel normal and lift your arms and look up at the same time

You can see how to perform the exercise in this video.

Perform this exercise twice a day, both in the morning and in the evening. Try to rotate your neck as far as you can. It may hurt a little bit, but that’s no problem.

The mobility of your upper back also influences your shoulder movements due to its connection to your rib cage. That’s why a stiff back also causes shoulder pain.

To perform this exercise you’ll have to buy this back stretcher.

By laying over this back stretcher. You’ll feel that your spine stretches and loosens up. You can also use it to stretch your lower back and reduce neck pain.

Lay down on it for about 20 minutes and several times a day. You’ll feel a significant difference within a week or so.

The third exercise you have to do is to improve the strength and function of your subscapular muscle.

By doing this, your shoulder blade moves better with your shoulder, resulting in less overuse of your rotator cuff muscles.

Perform the exercise like this:

• Place your hands at shoulder width against the wall at chest height
• Slowly bend through your arms towards the wall
• Slowly push of the wall again
• Repeat this exercise 15 times
• Do this 3 times

You can see how to perform the exercise in this video.

You’ll probably feel a difference between your left and right side. When the exercise becomes easy, you can also do regular push-ups. They have the same effect.

With these first three exercises, everything is set to improve your rotator cuff muscles to get rid of your shoulder pain.

The most often irritated muscle is the supraspinatus muscle. Supraspinatus tendinitis can cause a lot of pain and discomfort.

The function of your supraspinatus muscle is to lift your arm and guide your forearm alongside your shoulder blade.

When you have a shoulder injury, this movement can be excruciating.

Perform the exercise like this:

• Lift up both your arms sideways until it starts to hurt
• Slowly lower them again
• Repeat this 10 times
• Do this 3 times

You can see how to perform the exercise in this video.

Repeat this exercise twice a day. Don’t try to push the movement through the pain as this will only cause more problems. You’ll notice that you can go a bit further every single day until you reached full range of motion again.

At this point, you can use weights to gain even more muscle strength.

The final exercise trains your infraspinatus muscle.

It is the other rotator cuff muscle that often causes shoulder pain. It performs outer rotation of your shoulder and also stabilizes your shoulder joint itself.

Perform the exercise like this:

Lay down on your healthy side with your painful arm pushed in your side

• Keep your arm flexed in 90 degrees
• Now rotate your arm so that your hand faces the ceiling
• Repeat this ten times and do this three times

You can see how to perform the exercise in this video.

Perform the exercise twice a day. You can increase the repetitions to 15 and even add some weight when it becomes too easy.