Exercise Designs and Keeping Your Shoulders Healthy


Introduction: context. Keeping your shoulders healthy can depend on your age, prior activity/injuries, genetics...but your exercise selection can make it worse. Even HIT favorites.

Tip 1. "Touchdown." If you keep your overhead presses and pulls in this plane and range, you do a lot towards keeping your shoulders healthy. 

Exercises. Brand names will be mentioned, but the point is what the designs ask of your body, not to praise or damn the brand or the writers. But with 40 years experience and observation and as a former patient, and easier access to information than 40 years ago, I see no good reason to avoid examining what we do in our workouts.

Old Nautilus Double Shoulder, Side Raise.


Concern at the "top" of the motion: impingement.



Complex fixes:


 

Joseph Horrigan in 1990s Iron Man magazine.

At times, Bodymasters and Cybex used this in their Side Raise designs.


Nautilus from Ellington Darden's books. Medx brochure.

Two on the left don't allow for external rotation. On the right, adjustment at the "wrist" can allow for it.

Also notice the axes aren't parallel putting the movements in the "touchdown" (scapular) plane.


Nordin & Frankel. Flexion/extension limited by the capsule & ligaments. Abduction limited by the bony stop.

THE SCAPULAR PLANE “IS CONSIDERED MORE FUNCTIONAL BECAUSE IN THIS PLANE THE INFERIOR PORTION OF THE CAPSULE IS MOST LAX AND THE MUSCULATURE OF THE SHOULDER IS OPTIMALLY ALIGNED FOR ELEVATION…”

So the Medx Lateral Raise in this plane and set for external rotation is as close to a manufactured solution as you can find.

They and others use the scapular plane for pullovers, presses, pulldowns.

Alternatives: Scaption with dumbbells, dumbbell presses steep incline front of neck, pulldowns/chins to front hands slightly wider than shoulder width palms facing.

Tip 2, for all other exercises: "KEEP YOUR HANDS IN YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION."

REFERENCE FOR SCAPULOHUMERAL RHYTHM AND ROTATOR CUFF MUSCLES


Questions: 

What about a full range of motion? What about peak contraction? 

What about flexibility? Getting a good stretch with pec flyes?

What about dips? 270 degrees of motion in the pullover machine?

"Credentials" (2016)







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