If you have shoulder pain and stiffness while using your arms overhead, I encourage you to add scapular mobility exercises to your self care routine, as optimal movement of your shoulder blades along the posterior surface of your ribcage is vital to ensuring proper biomechanics of your shoulder joints when your arms are raised overhead.
If you're new to scapular mobility exercises, I would start with the Cow-Cat drill found here: Read more
Hanging from an object overhead is one of the most effective ways of maintaining and improving shoulder and spinal mobility.
Be sure that you are warmed up before engaging in hanging exercises - ideally, you want to take your shoulders and spine through a solid warm-up and even work up a bit of perspiration to ensure that your tissues are well perfused with blood to prevent injury. Read more
This video demonstrates some movement patterns that you can do with a long stick or dowel. I shot this video indoors with hope that closer positioning to my tripod allows for easier viewing of these movements.
Using a stick to take your shoulders through these and other movements can help you identify and work through restrictions in shoulder, trunk, and hip mobility. Read more
For an overview of exercise progressions that you can work at to improve your mobility and balance in a systematic way, please feel free to visit our Mobility Exercise Progressions page here:
There are very few activities of daily living that require us to use our innate capacity for shoulder extension - that is, to actively use our arms while they are behind us. This translates to having short biceps, brachialis, and pectoralis minor muscles, which predispose us to elbow and shoulder issues, including golfer's elbow, tennis elbow, and shoulder impingement syndrome.
For this reason, it's best that we include shoulder extension exercises in our self care programs. Read more
If you experience tightness in your shoulder "shawl" muscles, you will likely benefit from this stretch, highly effective for lengthening your trapezius and levator scapulae muscles.
Please be sure to enable audio for guidance. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below or you can always reach me at benkim@drbenkim.com. Read more
This is an excellent stretch for ensuring healthy tone of the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that surround the posterior region of your shoulder and your shoulder blade. Read more
As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud person is always looking down on things and people; as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.