Ever woken up in the morning and felt a twinge in your neck or shoulder? Many of us have, and I am certainly one of them.
It was 1997, I found myself butt naked on my mate’s floor feeling pretty sorry for myself after a night of heavy drinking and a game of beach rugby.
My mates had all gone out for a dawn surf and left me there. My mate’s mum had since come through to make sure we were OK, clean up around me, and strategically placed a towel over the offending area.
I tried getting up, only to find a sharp, shooting pain coming from my right shoulder. I couldn’t move my arm.
My shoulder issues stem back from my time at the Australian Defence Force Academy: We had just come back off exercise, where I distinctly remembered taking quite a heavy knock to my shoulder. My collar bone felt weak and a bit twingy, but was still working just fine so I had toughed through it. It turns out that knock started a chain of events that was pushed to a literal breaking point with a game of drunken beach rugby. As it turned out, I had damaged my AC joint (where the collar bone meets the acromion).
Not being able to use your arm sucks, especially when you use that arm to do everything.
What did I do to fix it? Nothing. I tried seeing the physio, because it was free, but all they did was a bit of ultrasound, which I now know to be only as effective as a placebo. This left me with a legacy of a pretty funky right shoulder.
So what should I have done?
Four things you need to do if you are in pain when you are surfing:
This post starts with a shout out to David, who wrote to me recently asking about basic exercises to help his shoulders.
The big problem is, I have never seen David, never met him, and don’t know what his specific issue is. So this means that what I plan to do here covers some pretty generic, but fairly common, shoulder issues.
Step #1: Identify and sort out postural imbalances
The formula for success starts by establishing optimal joint mechanics and muscle length tension relationships. For the shoulder, this means that we need to identify restrictions in any of these key offending areas:
1. Neck – particularly rotation and forward head carriage
2. Upper, middle and lower spine – particularly middle thoracic and lumbar extension
3. Shoulder blade and shoulder – tests for internal and external rotation (referred to as your rotator cuff)
4. Pelvic imbalances – WTF?
The foundation for your shoulders is your ribcage, which sits atop your pelvis. If your pelvis is imbalanced, so is your ribcage, and therefore so are your shoulders. You have to sort this out. Shoulder injuries are tricky because the root cause of the problem is often found elsewhere, and your shoulder issues are a nasty byproduct.
The most common shoulder issue that I deal with is a shoulder impingement, where the rotator cuff is dysfunctional, leading to pain either in the front of the shoulder or on top of the shoulder blade. This commonly has both a middle t-spine and pelvic imbalance that comes with it.
Once you identify what those issues are, you should mobilise the stuck joints and stretch the tight muscles only.
Often this also involves re-teaching breathing mechanics, as respiration will either assist or resist your natural shoulder function.
As an example, when you inhale, this naturally lifts and opens the ribcage, which encourages the shoulder to do the same. If you tried to lift and open your shoulder as you exhaled, you would be doing so against the resistance of the ribcage, which will be trying to do the opposite.
Two exercises that were developed by Moshe Feldenkrais that are helpful in reteaching this are shown below, and coached in detail in my corrective programmes (reference Chek P (2011) Scientific Shoulder Training Correspondence Course, Vista, CA: CHEK Institute).
Step #2 – Closed chain stability
For the clever reader who has already watched my video on the mechanics of paddling, you will already know that paddling is both open and closed chain.
If you haven’t seen this, then you can learn more by following this link.
Open chain would mean that when you pull on an object, your hand moves closer to you (like doing a lat pull down), and closed chain meaning you would move closer to your hand (like doing a pull up).
When you have an injured shoulder, and especially when you are in the acute phase of pain, you want to start with pushing and pulling exercises that are closed chain only. This is because we want to reset the shoulder using exercises that help create compression of the joint. The horsestance is a great example of a closed chain stability exercise for the shoulder.
Find out how to do this exercise check out my blog post on that here.
Ideas of easy and more challenging closed chain shoulder exercises
Your shoulder really likes being in this four point position (it evolved this way) and the supporting bony structures of your joint are still kind of developed like this, in that they are optimally aligned to be loaded in this posture.
