Hey, I’m dr Emil Tompkins and today I’m going to talk to you about five things that you can do for impingement syndrome and if you have shoulder pain you’re going to want to know about this. So I’m dr Emil Tompkins for the last 16 years we’ve been taking care of families and and children and people who are dealing with pain. And one of the things that we have a lot of shoulder pain and shoulders get painful for a lot of different reasons and one of them is impingement syndrome. When you think about the shoulder, you have the bone of your arm called the humerus and there’s a little ball at the end that fits into a socket here. And so sometimes if that ball isn’t sitting in the socket very well we can have pain or if that ball is way too high up in the socket, that can cause a problem too.
Impingement Syndrome
And that’s called impingement syndrome. And if you have impingement syndrome one, we’ve got to make sure that we get head of the humerus (the ball) slightly out of the socket a bit. But then we’ve got to create some stability so that it was, you’re moving around. It doesn’t get jammed up in there causing pain because you have muscles that travel underneath that area. You have nerves that travel underneath that area. You have blood vessels that travel underneath that area, and if that ball is jammed up into that socket really high, you’ll put pressure on those muscles, on those nerves, on those blood vessels, and then you’re going to have a lot of pain. It’s different than a rotator cuff injury, but it can cause a lot of problems and sometimes it’s hard to figure out. So there are some, typically as a chiropractor, I see this in our office, we take x-rays and we can identify that impingement and then we work on doing some things to help correct it.
What to do about it
So here’s some things that you can do. Number one is an adjustment to get that in the right position. That’s the first step to relieve that impingement.
Exercises for Impingement Syndrome
Next, let’s do some exercises. So what I have here is a TheraBand and I’ll stand back so you can see I have this TheraBand and what we’re going to do with it are a couple things. One, I just want to work on creating more, more balanced in the shoulders. A problem that we have is most of us have this issue where the shoulders round forward, head goes forward. That creates a lot of pressure and tension here. And so we need to work on, on opening up that area, creating balance between the muscles in the front and the muscles in the rear. And so the way we’re gonna do this is first you’re going to just slightly bring your shoulder blades together. You’re not going to pull them way back like this, but you’re just going to slightly bring those shoulder blades together. You’re going to keep those elbows in at your side. You’re going to grab something like some rubber tubing, some TheraBands, something like this with your elbows in, you’re just going to bring the arms out just like that. Bring the arms out, depending on how, how thick your rubber tubing is or, or how much you can handle, you can make it tighter or bring your arms in farther and work your way out.
Now, if any of these exercises causes additional pain, you absolutely, definitely want to stop. So you’re going to do that 15 times and you’re going to do one to three sets, depending on your, your level of health, your ability to handle this activity or the progression that you’re going through with your provider. So you just bring your shoulders back back. You bring your arms out while trying to keep your elbows as close to your body as you can, and you repeat that 10 to 15 times. The next thing we’re going to do is the, the Codman’s pendulum exercise. And anyone who’s dealt with shoulder rehab has probably seen something like this. For this one, we’re going to do it completely unweighted. We’re not going to add any weight. What we’re going to do is you’re gonna lean forward. Let’s pretend this is my bad arm.
You’re going to let that arm hang. And then with the Codman’s pendulum, your arm goes back and forth, but it’s not going back and forth because you’re moving your arm back and forth. Your is going to go back and forth because you’re moving your body and as you move your body, your arm just kind of naturally goes back and forth. That creates a little bit more normal mobility in that arm. And again, it’s moving because your body’s moving, not because I’m swinging, swinging the arm around, but as I move my body, then that arm will naturally swing. That exercise I’m going to want you to do for one minute on the effected arm. The next thing we’re going to do, you’re going to want to tie your TheraBand to something, something that’s not going to move. This probably isn’t the most ideal because it actually can move.
We’re gonna do a little bit more serious rotation of the shoulder. So the way we’re going to do this, you’re going to hold on to your TheraBand, your rubber tubing. You’ve tied it onto something that’s not going to move and then you bring your arm out like this and you do that over and over again. You’re going to do that 10 times and you’re going to do this one to three sets depending on your level of strength, your level of health in your shoulder, one to three sets. Bring that arm out and those rotator cuff muscles help your shoulder to be more stable, which is incredibly important for something like Fossette syndrome. Now let’s talk about the next exercise for this exercise. Again, you’re going to use your TheraBand. You’re going to tie it around something so that you have two now, two spots that you can hold on to, and then what we’re doing here is we’re doing a row, a high row, so you want this up pretty high and then what you want to do, I need to be in a position where I can get a little more attention.
Here. You want to row, you don’t want to bring your arm straight down. You want to bring him out to the side like that. Bring your arms out just like that. Hold, retract. You’re trying to bring your shoulder blades together as you do that, that shoulder retraction. Just another way that we’re strengthening the muscles that bring the shoulders back and realign the humerus inside that joint. The next exercise is going to be like a tricep extension. We need to work on the muscles that connect to the shoulder in the back of the arm. And so the way that we do that, again, we tie our TheraBand around something that’s hopefully not going to move. And then all we do is we slightly been forward, we have our arm at 90 degrees and we just pull straight back 10 times one to three sets. So the last exercise we’re going to talk about today is a bicep curl.
And so we can do this without using a whole lot of different pieces of equipment. We can just use this. And the way we’re going to do this is I’m just gonna have you step on one end of your rubber tubing or your TheraBand and then you just pull up just like that. There’s your bicep curl. You do that 10 times. And again, just like before, one, two, three steps. So these are the exercises that will make a difference in your impingement in your shoulder. Don’t forget them. Do these every other day to once a day if you can tolerate once a day and you’ll start to see more stability and less pain in that impinge shoulder. Guys, I’m dr Emil Tompkins. I hope you have a fantastic day and I wish you great health. We’ll see you soon.
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