On Your Body – Don't Shrug Off That Shoulder Pain

Muscle and Fitness Magazine - 1991
By James Stoxen, D.C.

As team chiropractor for the American Powerlifing Federation, (1986 - 1992) I've had the Opportunity to treat a large number of Elite-level athletes. I have not only seen champion bodybuilders, but also a number of other people who do weight training as part of an overall conditioning program.

I have found that injuries to the shoulder joint are all too common with these people, and that a large proportion of these injuries could have and should have been avoided.

The shoulder is die most mobile joint in the body. It allows the arm to move through a virtual 360-degree rotation. By being so mobile, it is also vulnerable to injury. The shoulder is a very loosely packed joint. The head of the humerus (upper arm bone) articulates upon a shallow, concave surface and is held in place and supported by the rotator cuff mechanism, glenoid labrum, shoulder capsule and several ligaments.

For people lifting weights, the shoulder is probably the most abused joint in the body. You put stress on the shoulder training chest and back as well as during your shoulder routine. Moreover the shoulder joint is involved in many arm training exercises as well.

Most lifters don't realize it, but you can even hurt your shoulder joint by training your legs. I see it all the time. For example, doing squats, lifters support the weight of the bar across the back of the shoulder girdle. As they strain to come up from the bottom position, many lifters will press forward and upward with the shoulders in an attempt to help move the weight. But as the shoulders press forward, the head of the humerus is jamrned forward into the anterior (front) capsule, stretching it so that the head of the humerus can become subluxated (moved forward out of posi6on) into the pocket created by the stretching procedure.

Sometimes a lifter who has subluxated his shoulder like this will go to the bench press, where he'll feel pain in be anterior part of the shoulder and assume that the discomfort is coming from the stress of benching or from using an improper benching technique. Of course, sometimes the injury is caused by benching, but in my experience it is often a result of something that happened during the squat, and the lifter can be fooled.

When a lifter comes into my office with this kind of complaint, I can make an adjustment to the shoulder joint by redirecting the head of the humerus within the confines of the shoulder capsule, which will help to restore proper motion to the joint. But this is only a temporary resolution of the problem unless I can determine what caused die injury in the first place and I'll then tell the lifter how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

Out of all the possible ways a joint as vulnerable as the shoulder can be injured, only a few cause the vast majority of shoulder injuries I see. One major cause, and a factor that often underlies shoulder injuries apparently resulting from other factors, is imbalanced development of the entire shoulder girdle.

The shoulder is surrounded by muscles that pull it in different directions. For example, the pectoral in the front, and muscles such as the lats, traps and rhomboids in the back. In addition, there are the primary movers of the shoulder itself – the anterior, medical (side) and posterior (rear) deltoid muscles. Finally, the shoulder stabilizers, such as the muscles of the rotator cuff, or the SITS group – supraspinatus,