If you feel some pain or stiffness in the shoulder, this stretch may help with the sports you play or physical activities that you do. To stretch out the right side, reach your right hand up and down your back keeping your right elbow pointed upwards. Avoid arching the back by keeping your spine in neutral. Pull the right elbow towards midline with your left hand while keeping the right elbow pointed upwards. Hold this for 30 seconds doing 3 sets on each side daily.

Stand beside a door frame or corner of a wall. Keeping your back straight and your inner core engaged, bring your arm up against the wall with the elbow and shoulder bent at 90 degrees. With the arm planted on the wall, draw your opposite shoulder back followed by your torso in a straight line. Keep the back straight and core engaged. Hold this for 30 seconds and repeat 3 times on each side 2 times per day. The tightness in the Pectoralis muscles can cause abnormal movement in your shoulder and can give you pain and dysfunction. Non optimal computer desk and sitting postures and performing activities and sports with a repetitive nature like climbing, volleyball, or any throwing sports can cause these imbalances. If you have pain or if you’re unsure about how these exercises affect your shoulder pain, consult your physiotherapist before continuing.

After straining your rotator cuff, retraining the muscles of the scapula is an important aspect towards full functional recovery with any activities or sports at or above shoulder height. You can do this without a weight at first to practice your technique, and if you are feeling confident with this then you can start with a 3 to 5 pound dumbbell. Start lying down on your back with your knees bent and your low back core stability muscles engaged. Straightening up the arm, begin to raise the dumbbell up towards the ceiling. Then at the end of the movement protract and lift your scapula up off of the floor with a focus on the posterior muscles doing the work and not your pectorals muscles. Do 15 lifts of the scapula for 3 sets daily. If you are unsure about your shoulder pain or about this exercise please consult your local physiotherapist before continuing.

This exercise is great for rehabbing from a rotator cuff strain or shoulder impingement strain. Wrap a mild resistive elastic band half way down the mid back, and then cross it over at the front and securely wrap both ends onto each hand. Turn facing a wall and place your pinky finger and edge of hand firmly against it. Keep your posture tall and inner core engaged while pushing your hands against the wall up to the ceiling in “V” formation and externally rotate the hands out, holding it at the top for a good long second. Then slowly bring it back down. Repeat this 10 to 15 repetitions for 3 sets. By keeping your inner core engaged and your posture tight, this exercise is great for rebuilding the shoulder strength you need in any overhead reaching sports, especially rock climbing, volleyball, and basket ball. You should not have any pain when doing this exercise. If you do experience pain please consult your local Physiotherapist before continuing.

This exercise is great for strengthening the rotator cuff in conjunction with the rest of the shoulder complex muscles after recovering from an impingement or rotator cuff strain. Loop a closed elastic band with mild resistance around your arms above your wrists. Kneeling on the ground, keep your spine in neutral posture with your inner core muscles engaged. Imagine there is clock face numbered 9 to 3 O’clock on the ground in front of you. Begin by reaching the right hand to 12 O’clock and then back to the start position. Proceed to continue to 1 O’clock, 2 O’clock, 3 O’clock and then backwards up to 12 O’clock again. Then do the same with your left hand to 12 O’Clock until you reach 9 O’clock and reverse back to 12 O’clock again. That’s 1 complete repetition. Do 5 repetitions for 3 sets. This exercise should not produce any pain. If it does please consult your local Physiotherapist before continuing. 

My name is Iyad, I’m a Physiotherapist here at INSYNC PHYSIOTHERAPY. What I would like to do today is go over an exercise I use for people who have a very weak and painful shoulder. Typically in those cases they lose a bit of range of motion. So this exercise is a very good way to start getting it back in a very de-threatening way to the shoulder that can actually help it through its range as it gets better and stronger. So for this you’re going to need to attach a band higher up just slightly above you. If you don’t have anything in your house else higher up that you can do in standing, you can just bring a chair and sit down and do the same thing. So what yay do is start the exercise here at the level that your shoulder is comfortable at and don’t push above it. So get the tension there, open your hand, pull the band down a little bit and clasp on it. So now there’s a tension higher up that’s going to want to bring my shoulder above. So what you do is pull down first, you hold for a second, then you let it take you up higher. Right after then, you do the exact same again, but this time you let it progress you a little higher. So you do that again, pull down, and let it take you higher up. And another time, you do that exact same thing… pull down and let it take you higher. So this is a really effective way of regaining some of your range of motion in flexion or you can it in this side angle of abduction. The exact same thing… you’re just going to do it facing away from the band and let it take you up. Now I recommend doing this exercise starting with a thicker band because when the shoulder is early on in the injury, it’s a little more… typically tends to be weaker, a bit more painful… so you start with a thicker band so you do less of the work and let the band help you on the way up. As you get stronger, you drop to a less resistance like a green band if you’re starting with a blue or go down to a red or yellow. Now for this thing, because its a range of motion exercise it’s better to do it throughout the day and not just in one set. I recommend doing 5 reps, 5 times per day or if you are a busy person 3 times per day should get you results. You should be seeing yourself go higher and higher each time. It’s ok to feel a bit of pain as long as it’s acceptable along as it’s not too intense, you should be ok. You’re not doing more damage when you feel it; It’s just that it tends to be more sensitive in those early stages so you just want to push past that. 

Hi, My name is Iyad, I’m a Physiotherapist here at INSYNC PHYSIOTHERAPY. I’m here with Wil, one of our Physiotherapists as well. And today, we’re going to go over some exercises for the overhead athlete. If you’re lifting weights or if you practise any sports that involve you going over head like tennis or volleyball, this would be a really exercise for you either as a warm up or as part of your rehabilitation. Now the most important thing is the way we face this line of pull here. So if you have a band or a cable machine, you stand facing it at a 45 degree angle alright. So Wil’s going to help us with the exercise. So this exercise involves 3 steps. Each one works at a different aspect of the shoulder muscles and the shoulder blade muscles. So the most important thing is where you stand like I said. So when Wil pulls back here we see that’s the perfect angle here because it’s the line of the shoulder blade. Pull… Once he pulls his elbow back we rotate the shoulder back there; So try to hinge around this point where the elbow is and Wil punches over head. When he punches over head this will help him work on the control, especially in the overhead position and fires the rotator cuff muscles equally and allows him to really really engage a lot of those musculature there. So let’s do that one more time Wil. Good! That looks really really good. The most important thing is when you’re rotating back not to hike the shoulder up from here. Okay, so Wil can you see that, how it would look like if it’s fatiguing? The whole shoulder starts to lift up. So when you start seeing yourself fatigue it’s probably good idea to take a break; stop. So we start usually with 5 reps. If you can’t do 5, do 3 reps. The most important thing is that you’re consistently performing this exercise really really well and that you’re not shaky in the overhead position. If you are shaky just take a break. You’ve probably done too much or drop the weight.

This is the Latissimus Dorsi muscle stretch in 4 point. It’s attached from the upper arm bone, the humerus, tip of the shoulder blade, and onto the last half of the middle and lower spine and pelvis. To stretch the right lat, place the back of your right hand to your left side in front of you while clasping it with your left hand. Reach forward to your left and keep your elbows straight. Keep your knees wide apart and the back of your feet flat on the mat. Reaching forward lean to the right arm pit. Hold for 30 seconds, do 3 sets. Repeat on the opposite side if it’s also tight! This is great for increasing the mobility and function of the shoulder as well as decreasing strain on the lower back and Sacro-iliac joints.

Hi, My name is Iyad, I’m a Physiotherapist at INSYNC PHYSIOTHERAPY. Today I want to show you a simple stretch for the Latissimus Dorsi muscle which goes right over here from the shoulder right down to your low back. Quite often in sports like rock climbing or even ultimate frisbee or volley ball you use a lot of this muscle to climb up or send your arm up and going down. You want to keep your muscle loose and this is a simple stretch that you can do at home. All you’re going to need is a band … something stretchy but still quite a bit stiff so it’ s not looser version like something like that. You need something that’s going to provide you some resistance. A tire tube would work really well or a pull up assist band. Loop it around your hand and have it loosely there. You shouldn’t be gripping too much because that’s going to limit the amount of stretch you get. So just have it there to provide a bit of resistance. And you start walking back until you feel some tension and you lean into it. When you lean into it you should feel a stretch throughout this area here and maybe even lower down, but you shouldn’t be pushing into too much discomfort. The whole purpose of this is to give you a nice comfortable stretch to help you regain some of the range of motion that you may have lost from a lot of usage of that muscle. It should be comfortable throughout. Hold it for 30 seconds. You might find you may be able to drop a little lower into it and that’s completely fine. I would do 2 to 3 rounds of 30 seconds and doing it so it’s comfortable. 

A rotator cuff tear can cause a lot of muscle imbalances to occur at the shoulder complex. These imbalances can affect the optimal movement in the shoulder and delay your functional recovery. The four point walk out helps to retrain the muscle activation in the shoulder blade to work together with your rotator cuff muscles for a better functional recovery. Place your hands and knees in a four point position in neutral supine. It’s important to make sure your inner core is engaged and that your spine is in neutral posture throughout this exercise. Start by walking one hand out to one side, then back to the centre, and then to the other side, and back to the centre again. Put full equal weight each time you place your hand down. Repeat this for 30 seconds 3 sets 2 times daily. If you have any pain or unsure if this is the right exercise for you, consult your local Physiotherapist before doing this exercise.