♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet. ♪
- Hi folks I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist,
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- We're the world most famous
physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- And we are talking about how to stop shoulder pain in bed,
sleeping postures.
Shoulder pain in bed and at night can often be attributed
to poor positioning.
- Right.
- A lot of people think, well, I've got a bad shoulder,
it's going to be hurting at night
because I have a bad shoulder.
Not necessarily, a lot of times you can find
the right posture to put it in,
put it in like a healing posture.
- Right.
- It gives you the chance to get better
and you're not gonna make it worse all night long.
- Right, so things that are going to take stress off
the shoulder joint and allow maximum circulation
is gonna be a good thing for it.
So when you wake up in the morning it feels better
versus beat up.
- Yeah, so we're going to show you three options.
Obviously, the first thing is if you have a painful shoulder
we want you to try to avoid staying on, lying on it.
- Right.
- You want to go ahead and lie on the other side
if possible.
- Right, or if you could sleep supine on your back,
that's a really good option.
A lot of people say, I always sleep on my shoulder.
I've been doing that for 30 years, I can't change it.
And that's why we're going to show you some options.
- Yeah, let's start off with it,
we're going to show you first what we recommend
that you sleep on the non painful shoulder.
This is going to be the painful shoulder.
- Sure.
- Should I mark it off somehow?
But let's go ahead,
can I have a couple of pillows here Brad?
- Sure.
- So I'll take all three of them.
- [Brad] Yup.
There's two, here's the third.
And this is actually a sleepOvation pillow
that I actually use.
I like it cause it works really well for sidelyers
I think.
- Yeah, it's a unique pillow, actually has springs in it.
- It has springs in it.
- You cannot feel them but they offer some good posture.
- Yeah, good support.
So if I sleep on my side,
so I'm sleeping on my non painful shoulder,
I'm lying on my side like this.
Now, this shoulder, is my painful shoulder.
I don't want this down like this all night long.
So you're actually going to take a couple of pillows,
lay one pillow right across, even level with your body
and the other pillow right on top of it.
And that puts the arm in a great position.
You know, it's a nice, relaxed, healing posture.
- Right. It's in what we call neutral position.
The weight's taken off of the side,
internally rotated allows maximum circulation
to that shoulder, everything you want.
- Yeah, you can go on like this.
- Yeah.
- You can find different positions for it.
Now this does also work, you can lay your arm on your body.
I've often done this,
but it works better to have the pillows,
especially if you have a painful shoulder.
- Sure.
- So, let's say you want to sleep on the painful shoulder.
You just been doing it for 50 years
and you're going to continue to do it.
This is what we're going to recommend.
A lot of times you're going to have one or two pillows
on the side, so you have enough support
but you're going to take a third pillow, a throw pillow.
And you're going to place that right here
and you're going to form a canal, a gap.
- Now, this pillow, if it wasn't thick enough,
you could either fold it or
- Put another one on top. - a second pillow on
because his Mic will get in the way,
we're just going to leave it down.
- Sure, so here you got, you're going to put this arm
into the gap like this and now take a support on the head.
I'm taking support here and there's less support
on the shoulder.
So you can lay on it without it hurting as much
or taking stress.
- And it doesn't jam that humeral socket
into the ball, into the socket.
- Right. - Right.
You'll find out this is much more comfortable
than just laying directly on it.
Now, if you want to make it even a little bit better
you can actually roll back a little bit like this.
- I was just going to say you can actually do that
if you don't have this pillow.
- Right.
- And it's still helpful.
- Yeah, and when you roll back like that a lot of times
it's helpful to have a pillow behind you.
- Yep.
- Well, you can put that one in there
because it'll prevent me from rolling over there.
- As you can see, you're going to have to take
some of the pillows from the kids or something.
- Yeah, it takes a lot of pillows to work on it.
So that's actually the third option,
to actually sleep rolled over a little bit.
- Sure.
- Another option.
Let's say you're going to sleep on your back.
- Yep.
- When you sleep on your back.
This also, let's say this is my painful arm,
I don't like to have, it's actually into extension
here a little bit right now.
- Sure.
- To be a little more comfortable, yeah,
you wanna again take a pillow
and place it underneath the armpit.
And I place it up onto the body like this
and this is just a real good, comfortable position.
I actually recommend this with all my patients
that they do have a pillow like this
even when they sit on a couch or recliner.
- Right.
- I say when you're trying to get the shoulder pain
to calm down, throughout your day you should have a pillow.
- Including driving.
- Yes.
- As long as it doesn't impede with your driving.
But if you're in the passenger
definitely have a pillow with you.
If you've got a sore shoulder and take the weight off,
you'll be amazed how much more comfortable
the drive will be.
- Right, all day long.
Let that shoulder calm down.
We're trying to get the inflammation down.
You're going to want to absolutely just avoid
sleeping on your stomach.
Cause if you sleep on your stomach,
there's really no good position for the arms.
You're like this, but a lot of people are like this.
- [Brad] Which could really irritate it.
- Yeah
- [Brad] Particular if you fall asleep
and it stays like that for extended time.
- I've never had a patient do this
but they said for some people who just can't stop it,
they do it in the middle of night.
They sow a tennis ball into the T-shirt.
- Yeah.
- So like, if you lay on your shirt, it's gonna
- [Brad] It wakes you up.
- It's going to wake you up
so you so get off your stomach again.
- Right.
- But I don't know if you want to go to those terms
but maybe it's going to be necessary.
So, that's it for this video.
If you want to see this video as a part of a series
of videos on shoulder pain.
I think we got about 30 videos, don't we Brad, I believe.
- Just for the shoulders?
- Just for the shoulder.
And to find this series, go to bobandbrad.com,
go to the program section and look for the shoulder series.
- And the reason there so many is because you're only
going to need to probably watch a few of them
for your specific problem.
But you can easily find them, click on it.
And there's a PDF printout with the exercises
and reminders of what we talked about.
So you don't have to go back and watch the video
over and over again.
- So the one we just did today, there's a printout of that.
You can watch it or read it and not have to watch
the video again.
This is all free.
We don't even ask for an email.
This is just all our service to you.
- There you go.
- All right.
Thanks for watching.
- Thank you.