I had some good feedback regarding my article about what to do if your shoulder hurts doing pull ups. I hadn’t realised that there were quite so many people who were experiencing that problem. So I’ve put together a two-part article with a bit more detail about the exact protocol I carry out in order to get rid of my shoulder pain.
What was causing the shoulder pain?
When I last had shoulder pain, it was caused by two things:
- Poor soft tissue quality
- Lack of thoracic spine mobility
Let’s take each of those issues and address them in turn. I’ll look at soft tissue quality today and thoracic mobility tomorrow.
Why should I care about soft tissue quality? What is tissue quality anyway?
Well, asking about tissue quality is another way of asking how many knots or lumps there are in your muscles. If you’ve ever been for a massage and the masseur has been kneading away at your back and suddenly they’ve prodded a tender spot that rolls under their fingers – that’s poor tissue quality. They’ve found a knot.
If your tissue quality gets really bad, it can be seen by visual inspection, as the affected area is raised, like a pumped muscle. It sounds impressive but it’s actually quite painful and you have to be wilfully stupid (like me!) to let it get that bad normally…
Anyway, poor tissue quality (knots) just makes your muscles really tight. And tight muscles cause irritation. Tony Gentilcore has described it as being like tying a knot in a resistance band. If your shoulder muscles are tight because they’re full of knots, the amount of room your shoulder joint has got to move is going to be reduced. And that means that your shoulder is probably going to impinge.
An impingement of the shoulder is basically where one of the structures (tendons or part of a muscle) gets trapped between the humerus (your arm bone) and the acromion of the scapula (the pointy bit that comes off the shoulder-blade). If you want more detail than this, try looking into Eric Cressey’s shoulder savers series.
The solution is to improve your tissue quality. You need to remove the knots.
How can I improve my soft tissue quality?
The following picture shows a selection of my pain relief tools! The foam roller should be familiar to most people as they’ve become quite common in most gyms. The other items are:
- A hockey ball
- Two baseballs (commemorative versions not essential)
- Two tennis balls taped together
I use the foam roller for general soft tissue management. You can use it for most large muscle groups, such as the front, back and sides of the thighs and calves but it falls down because of its size when you need to work a smaller muscle. I use it to cover a large area quickly and find out whether there’s a problem. If you want to look further into using the roller, then Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson have written well about this subject.
How do you know if there’s a problem? Roll the muscle on the roller. If there’s a problem, it’ll hurt. Also, if you have a lumpy bit in the muscle that gives a bit when you press it, that’s a knot. If you’ve been using the roller for a while and you have some stubborn knots, they might not hurt that much when you roll them. That’s when you need something tougher.
How do I use the balls to help with soft tissue quality?
I roll on top of them. I lie on the hockey ball for getting at knots in my back and shoulder girdle. It’s completely solid and, being smooth, rolls around quite nicely on bare skin without causing welts. I find the baseballs leave me looking like I’ve been to “one of those sorts of parties”.
I tend to use the baseballs together (because I have two of them) and they work better when I have a T-shirt on as the stitching grips the fabric and moves with it.
What muscles do I roll?
Well, that depends on where it hurts! But I find that if my soft tissue quality starts to go, it starts to go all down my back and around my shoulder girdle. When this happens, I hit the following areas:
- Latissimus dorsi (the two large snowshoe-shapes just above your lower back but also under your armpit: it’s a big muscle)
- Trapezius (the big triangle that has the pointy end towards your lower back and the wide end at your shoulders)
- Rhomboids(hard to find on an anatomy chart as the trapezius and the rotator cuff muscles cover them but the ball will find them about half way up your back, just alongside your spinal erectors)
- Spinal erectors (the snakes running up either side of your spine)
- Rotator cuff(these insinuate themselves under your trapezius and pop out just above your latissimus: they cover over part of the rhomboids)
That’s all a bit technical. What do you actually do?
Practically speaking, I do this:
- I lie on my back with the hockey ball under one side of my lower back and gently roll on the ball until it reaches the bottom of my latissimus.
- I work the ball upwards until I find a knot.
- I work at the knot by rolling the ball around on it until it feels a bit softer
- If it’s a really bad knot and doesn’t respond to rolling, I will lean hard on the ball without rolling until I feel the knot start to break up. When this happens, I feel a release of tension and the ball usually sinks a bit deeper into my back.
- I repeat with the other muscles in my back.
- When I get to the upper trapezius, I often use both the baseballs together to put pressure on both sides at the same time. For some reason, this seems to work better than doing each side individually. I don’t know why.
Sometimes, you may need to move your arm around to get at the knots. Here, I’m putting my arm in the air so I can get at the muscles around my shoulder-blade.
When I’ve finished rolling, I usually finish up with an overhead squat and reach test. This tells me how successful I’ve been at loosening up the knots. If I get a bad result, I know I still have a lot of work to do and maybe need to find some new techniques. If it’s a normal result for me, I know I just need to do the same routine a few more times and I’ll be right as rain.
Tomorrow, I’ll write about the techniques I’ve used to improve my thoracic mobility, which has also helped a lot in removing shoulder pain.
For a list of my key articles by category, please check out this index.
Tags: corrective · injury · pull up2 Comments
[...] how soft tissue rolling is great for shoulder health; and [...]
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