In this video, I'm going to show you effective ways to treat a rotator cuff
injury at home. Hey everyone, Dr. Rowe here at SpineCare in
St. Joseph, Michigan. So we're going to help tackle shoulder pain and
impingement by targeting a group of four muscles and their tendons known as the
rotator cuff. The rotator cuff is made up of four small muscles: the supraspinatus
infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis. They work as a group to
help stabilize the shoulder joint, especially with rotating and raising the
arm overhead. With these exercises, we're going to focus on activating the rotator
cuff, loosening it up, and helping to decrease the likelihood of shoulder
impingement while doing overhead or reaching motions. Just as a note, these
exercises are for minor strains and sprains, not for treating tears or major
injuries to the shoulder or rotator cuff. If you fall in that latter category, make
sure to make an appointment with your local doctor to have it checked out.
Alright, let's get started! So to do this guide also you need is a
general therapy band. You can get these at any place that has a sporting goods
department (including Walmart), you can also get them on Amazon. Then you
need two cans of soup. These ones right here are just 16 ounces. So for the first
exercises, we're going to take our therapy band and make a loop with this.
So just tie the ends together. Also, with these exercises, why they work so well is
because they work on dynamic movements. That is activating the whole rotator
cuff, engaging all four of those muscles to help loosen them up and just help
strengthen them overall, and get your injury repaired much more quickly.
I think they're a little bit more fun to do also. So what we're going to do for
the first part is keep our arms straight and then (I like to keep the thumbs
pointed upwards) what we're going to do is build resistance into the band by
taking our arms outwards. So just like this. You can kind of see how I'm just
resisting against that band. Start very low and keep doing this, and every
time that you come back, raise your arms up just a little bit and then keep
repeating that process and keep going all the way up as far as you're
comfortable with until your arms are completely
straight overhead and then just start to come back down until you finally get
back to that starting position (right through here) and do a couple of those
sessions, three to five times usually works very well. So for the next part
we're going to switch up the movement. We're going to keep one arm locked while
the other one then goes down and then starts to work its way upwards again.
These are dynamic movements that just hit the shoulder from all angles, so it
keeps the muscle guessing, and then just switch to the other arm, and again I like
to do these for about three to five times in a complete cycle. Sometimes it's
hard to keep track of where you've been, but it's no big deal, Just start over at
that point. So for the next part, we're going to use our soup cans.
If these feel like they're a little bit too light, what you can do is substitute
it for a two and a half pound, five pound dumbbell... whatever you feel comfortable using.
So we're going to start off in that same position with our elbow
straight, arms straight, and we're going to then build resistance into the band.
With this, we're going to go all the way up with it as much as we're comfortable
with and then we're going to come all the way back down, and then just repeat
that process. So resistance, we're going to go all the way up with it, and then
come all the way back down, and try to do about three to five sets of these.
For this next one, we're going to focus on trying to strengthen the shoulder
capsule and those rotator cuff muscles. We're going to start with the elbows
bent, tucked in towards our side, so we want them kind of clamping on to our
sides (right here). From there, we're going to take our hands and then externally
rotate out as much as we're able to. So we're taking the hands outwards. In this
position, we're then going to lift the arms up, those elbows up, all the way as
much as we're able to go comfortably, and you should feel a lot of tension being
built into those shoulders. It's really helping to strengthen them, so again
we're taking the elbows, locking them to the sides, taking the arms outwards,
externally rotating that shoulder, and then lifting that up overhead as far as
we feel comfortable, and give that a good five-second hold before
bringing it back down. Repeat that three to five times.
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