Your otho sounds like an asshole. You need to go back and find out exactly what's up and what the options are to remedy the situation.
Anyway, here's
this guy's story.
Shoulders: An Owner's Manual
by Ari Finander
From Hardgainer #60 - May/June 99'
“Wow man, you look like you know what you’re doing, could you recommend some neck exercises for me?”
“Sure,” I replied, going on to impart the information I’d learned about neck training from THE INSIDER'S TELL-ALL HANDBOOK ON WEIGHT-TRAINING TECHNIQUE. I gave him the reference and author’s name, and encouraged him to look up the other books written by Stuart, politely letting him know that I really couldn’t answer all of his questions at that time, but offering to answer a few more each time I saw him in the gym after that. The young man seemed really keen to learn more. Then came the question: “Hey, how much do you bench?”
“I don’t bench press,” I told him, which pretty much ended the conversation there.
He was probably thinking something to the effect of, “If you don’t bench press, you mustn’t know much about weight training.”
I don’t bench press because I didn’t look after my shoulders properly. I focussed on the chest too much, and on the upper back too little. The problems began with intermittent pain and popping in my right shoulder. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t sleep on my right side. Finally, I couldn’t get to sleep because the pain was so bad. As it turns out, I was experiencing the pain of an impingement syndrome. As my sports medicine doctor described it to me in layman’s terms: a ligament in my right shoulder was squishing some of the tendons and other structures there. I could bench press again, if I was to risk surgery, but that’s not something I want to do, now or ever.
From what I know of it, things may work better than before, but after surgery the structures operated on never really heal as strong as before. This is especially so when they were planning to shave away part of one bit inside my shoulder to make more room for the bits being impinged upon.
I decided to hold off on the surgery and see if there was some way I could fix the problems myself, now that I knew where the problems were coming from. I began reading up on the structure and function of the various aspects of the shoulder joint. I also began a month or so of complete rest—no weight training at all. Why a complete layoff? Because the shoulders are involved indirectly in just about every weight-training movement. I personally don’t believe in “training around” injuries as it just leaves you waiting to heal for a longer period of time by continually stressing the injured area.
After this period of complete rest, I began working towards my recovery. I started with stretching exercises for the chest, neck, arms and shoulders. Then I moved on to experimentation to find out which exercises hurt the shoulder, and which did not. I did not want to try several exercises at a given series of workouts, and not be certain about which exercises were causing me pain during or after the workout. One exercise at a time had to be tested, initially, until I was able to get a better idea of which groups of movements hurt, and which groups didn’t.
I spent ten weeks experimenting initially to find out the basic types of movements that my shoulders could still handle. If a movement hurt during the workout, I stopped it. If a movement felt uncomfortable during the workout, I gave it a chance to see if it produced pain the next day, or after a few workouts. If it did, I dropped it. I saw no sense in trying to hold onto exercises that hurt me simply because they are productive for others who are not recovering from injury. I needed time to heal, and I was determined to give my body that time away from exercises that aggravated the injury. I’m still experimenting as my shoulders get stronger and the injury is less and less troublesome.
Every so often I go back and do a few sets of an exercise that I stopped using, to see if it’s still a problem. Most movements still are, but they are getting better. Hopefully in the next year I’ll be bench pressing again, as the bench press was a very enjoyable movement for me.
I gave myself an extra two weeks after the ten weeks of experimentation, bringing the total active healing time to about twelve weeks before I began intensive rehab exercises for my shoulders. I don’t count the much earlier pre-layoff post-injury months as healing time, as I was still trying to train around or through the pain, thus making the injury worse.
The next step involved balancing the shoulders. I needed some major strengthening of my upper-back muscles to counteract the forward pull of my chest musculature. This forward pull was putting several of the structures inside my shoulder joint in greater contact with each other than is desirable. It was also compressing the joint a bit. This, combined with the loads I was previously putting on it doing bench presses and weighted dips, built up to the point where injury occurred.
After I’d healed a bit, I began rehabilitation of the shoulder with my new knowledge. I began using shoulder presses with dumbbells, to increase the strength of the upper traps and abductor muscles. Abduction occurs when the arms are brought away from the body centerline at the beginning of the press, with stress to these muscles throughout the movement. Strict cable rows with an effort to pull my shoulders back at the end of the motion were also used. Incline shrugs were used initially, but had to be dropped due to rib pain from being compressed against the incline bench. Finally, I drastically improved my form on my external rotation exercise—seen as the lying L-fly in THE INSIDER'S TELL-ALL HANDBOOK ON WEIGHT-TRAINING TECHNIQUE—by slowing down the speed of the repetitions (not super slow, but still very controlled) and lowering both the weight and the reps per set (higher reps irritated the shoulder).
In the end, I’m still unable to do any type of bench pressing without pain with the exception of incline dumbbell pressing. However, I no longer have constant pain in my shoulder. I’m also able to do chin-ups again, one of my favorite exercises (probably because they’ve always been difficult for me). As it stands, I don’t think any possible benefits of bench pressing again outweigh the risks of having my shoulder operated on, regardless of how non-invasive the surgery has become.
I’ll convey to you what I know about the basics of keeping your shoulders healthy. For many of you, what I say here will be common knowledge. However, I’ve learned through interaction with both advanced and beginning trainees that what’s common knowledge to many may still be new, and important news to a few.
You can trade in your car after having not taken care of it as well as you should have, and buy another one. But the same is not true of our bodies: what you have now is what you’ll always have, so don’t break it!
This article is divided into three sections: (1) common exercises that can be rough on the shoulders, (2) improving the muscular balance of the shoulders, and (3) mistakes that can occur in normally productive exercises that may injure the shoulders.
1. HIGH-RISK EXERCISES
How many of you reading this have gone into the gym and just cringed at what you’ve seen some people doing? Poor form left, right and center, and some downright dangerous exercises. How many of you have heard one person who seems to know what he’s talking about say one thing and then another person who seems equally reputable tell you the opposite? It can be quite confusing. My purpose here is not to scold you and tell you “don’t do this” and “you’ll get hurt if you do that.” My purpose is to point out some of the aspects of training that have the potential to damage one’s shoulders. I say “potential,” because some people will be able to train productively on an exercise for their entire lives that would cripple ninety-nine percent of other trainees. There are very few absolutes in training.
Upright row
Some people promote the use of upright rowing as a compound movement that focuses more of the stress on the medial deltoid, and trapezius muscles, than shoulder pressing. The action is like the lateral raise machine, where the pads rest on the upper arms, allowing one to use much more weight than would be possible in good form by doing standard lateral raises. However, the exercises are not the same.
The upright row internally rotates the arms, placing the external rotator muscles (the easily injured rotator cuff muscles that hold your shoulder joint together) in a very compromising position of stretch under tension. For the external rotator muscles, this is a position inviting injury. And it gets worse—as the arms are brought upwards in that position, the attachment of some of these small rotator cuff muscles gets squished inside the shoulder joint. For many people, this is just what your body doesn’t need. Over time, the strain builds up, and you end up with a shoulder injury. Add poor form with heaving or jerking the weight up, and you make the situation all the worse.
Press behind neck and chin behind neck
For some people, these exercises work very well. It’s important to understand that it’s only some people who were born with the shoulder structure to tolerate these movements. Most everyone else will have problems stemming from the severe position of the shoulders in the bottom position of the press, and the top position of the chin, where the bar is behind the neck and the shoulders are in a vulnerable position. The problems may make themselves apparent quite quickly, or slowly appear over time. Better choices are dumbbell presses, barbell presses to the front, and regular chin-ups.
Pec deck
This exercise should be renamed “the pec wreck machine.” The strain that this device puts on the shoulders is immense. You’re forcing your shoulders through an unnatural range of motion with the arms externally rotated in most cases. And even if you’ve altered your form to remove this rotation, you’re still hammering the joints and the small muscles holding the shoulder in place. There are so many much more productive exercises out there, that this dangerous isolation exercise is best left alone.
Fly
The dumbbell fly is not a good choice for a chest exercise. It has high injury potential due to the odd stresses it presents to the shoulder. The angle of the arm being perpendicular to the body line produces poor conditions within the shoulder joint. That, and the strain on the biceps tendon as well as the rotator cuff in trying to control the weight and keep the shoulder together, combine to make this an unsafe exercise.
Arnold press
The Arnold Press (named after guess who?) involves a dumbbell press where the arms start in a position as if you’d just completed a dumbbell biceps curl including having moved your elbows forward excessively. You then press the dumbbells up from this low position, initially pronating the hands, bringing your elbows out to the sides as you’re pressing them upwards. Any benefits of whatever slight range of motion increase one gets with this exercise are offset by the risk of injury from overstressing the rotator cuff muscles as they try and stabilize the weight as it’s moved in two directions at once.
Clean
Although this movement has the potential for building size and strength, it has a high injury potential as well. As with behind-the-neck movements, some people have bodies better suited for this exercise. However, the very nature of this exercise is one that relies on momentum to accomplish the lift. You’re using a weight that’s too heavy to lift in a controlled manner, which invites injury to not only the shoulder, but the elbow as well. The lower back is also at risk from over arching to power the weight up.
Push press
The purpose of the push press is to allow one to cheat a weight to arm’s length overhead that a person would not be able to press in good form. Just as one uses the lower back to help cheat a weight that’s too heavy to curl strictly, during the push press the legs are used to cheat the weight overhead. I’ve heard some argue that this method allows one to get more stimulation from the negative part of the exercise. That’s all well and good, but from my personal experience, the injuries occur during the positive aspect of the press. Your shoulders, neck and lower back are all at risk here. A better choice would be to use either a barbell or dumbbell press in strict form with a weight that you can handle properly.
Lateral raise
With the little finger higher than the thumb, similar problems occur with this commonly suggested method of performing lateral raises as occur with upright rows.
2. MUSCLE IMBALANCE
I’m going to ask you to do something in a few sentences. It’s important that you don’t think about what I ask, but you just do it, so as not to taint the results for you. Relax and continue reading. Nice and relaxed? Now pull your shoulders forward. How far forward did they come? An inch or more? Or did they not come forward at all? This brings up a few questions that you need to try and honestly assess for yourself.
If your shoulders were brought forward a very slight bit or not at all, is this due to a strength imbalance or just poor posture? If it’s poor posture, is that itself caused by a strength imbalance? So many people focus on what they can see than what’s hidden behind the visible musculature. Performing much more intensive work for the chest than for the massive musculature of the back is a prime example. I was guilty of this very thing, and it has contributed greatly to my current circumstances.
If you’ve been focusing primarily on developing a broad and well-developed chest, and neglecting a massive and powerful back, you’re likely on the road to injury due to muscle imbalance. The shoulder is a very complicated joint, and very difficult to get back to 100% efficiency after an injury. The best thing for your long-term development is to focus on balancing out the different areas around the shoulder, even if it means you won’t have striated pecs as soon as you’d like. In the end, those impressive pectoral muscles will atrophy away if your shoulders are too damaged to continue training your pecs.
In order to prevent imbalances in the shoulder from occurring (or to have an idea of how to modify a program to treat an imbalance once it has occurred) it’s necessary to build the muscles that normally oppose the ones that are pulling your shoulders forward. The muscles that play the largest part in the hunched shoulder look are the pectoralis major and minor. The pectoralis major pulls the upper arm across the front of the body. The pectoralis minor originate on the ribs underneath the pectoralis major, and insert into the coracoid process on the scapula (shoulder blade). It functions to draw your shoulders forward. These are not the only muscles involved in pulling the shoulders forward. To counter these muscles, you must increase the strength of the rhomboid muscles and the trapezius muscles.
This can be accomplished by providing more attention to upper-back work than to chest work. From a strength and size point of view, this makes more sense, as the musculature of the back is far larger and has much greater potential for strength and size increases than do the pectoral muscles. Some of the best exercises for the upper-back area are illustrated and explained in Stuart’s THE INSIDER'S TELL-ALL HANDBOOK ON WEIGHT-TRAINING TECHNIQUE. Specifically, the incline shrug and the rack deadlift will do a lot to increase the strength of these muscle groups. Beyond these, chins, pulldowns, and rows hit these muscle groups too, along with other muscles including the rear deltoids, lats and biceps. Having movements such as these as primary lifts in your routine, rather than as secondary emphasis after pressing movements, will go a long way to correcting shoulder imbalances, or preventing them in the first place.
As a final note on this topic, too few trainees perform shoulder presses, opting instead to focus primarily on the bench press. This is a mistake! The pectorals and latissimus muscles work to adduct and draw the arm downward. Shoulder pressing can help to maintain balance in this regard by strengthening the musculature involved in abducting and raising the arms; not to mention the fact that a strong shoulder press will aid your bench press.
Another type of imbalance can occur between the internal and external rotators of the shoulder joint. The internal rotators consist of several small muscles as well as the large and powerful pectorals and latissimus muscles. By comparison, the external rotators are comprised of small muscles alone. To help you get an idea of what I’m talking about between internal and external rotation, do the following:
1. Stand with your right arm at your side. The upper arm will remain at your side for the remainder of this example.
2. Bend your elbow, raising your forearm to ninety degrees, or parallel with the floor.
3. Bring your forearm across your body: this is internal rotation.
4. Now, rotate the upper arm the opposite way, bringing the forearm away from the body: this is external rotation.
During this exercise it’s not the movement of the forearm that mattered, but the direction of rotation of the upper arm bone. The movement of the forearm served to make the direction of the upper arm clear.
As I mentioned earlier, the large pectoralis and latissimus muscles are among the internal rotators, and this puts the little external rotators at a disadvantage. Why should you care about these small muscles? Because these small muscles (as well as the small internal rotators) are helping to keep your shoulders together! The shoulder evolved to be a very mobile major joint. In that process, however, it lost a good deal of stability. Without your external rotators helping to stabilize the joint, you would find it exceedingly difficult to even raise your arm, much less lift heavy weights with it.
The upper-back work mentioned earlier will help your external rotators to a degree by strengthening the rear deltoid muscle, which is an external rotator. You can go further to preventing rotator cuff injury by adding a specific external rotation exercise to your routine. It’s not just by accident that such an exercise appears in two variations in Stuart’s book on weight-training technique. There it’s referred to as the L-fly. I prefer to call it simply “external rotation.” Now, although I suggest that you purchase this book, or encourage your local library to buy a copy, I’ll provide a brief description of it here:
1. Lay on your side on a flat bench.
2. In the uppermost arm, hold a dumbbell.
3. Place this arm in line with your body, against your side.
4. Bend the elbow to ninety degrees, bringing your forearm perpendicular to the bodyline.
5. Lower the dumbbell and forearm across the front of your body, then raise it until it’s nearly vertical.
6. Repeat for the required number of reps.
A very light weight is all that’s needed with this exercise, even after you’ve become accustomed to it and learned the form. Starting out with a bare dumbbell rod would be a good thing, increasing the weight only after you can complete your repetitions in slow and controlled form. Speed of movement is a big issue in this exercise—go slow. Increase the weight in the smallest increments you have available.
Not only will strengthening your external rotators make your shoulders less susceptible to injury, it will also allow you to use heavier weights in your other upper-body movements.
3. SAFE ONLY IF DONE PROPERLY
I’m going to finish off this article with a brief review of some popular and productive exercises that, when done improperly, can lead to shoulder injury. The exercises listed are ones that, under normal conditions, are productive movements. The versions specified here are examples of poor form or alternate versions.
Bench press
Problems here come from an ultra-wide grip, or when the bar is brought too near the neck. A grip that has the forearms angled away from the body and out to the sides in the bottom position of the bench press is too wide. Such a wide grip makes it difficult for the rotator cuff muscles to stabilize the shoulder joint. When you add a heavy weight to the equation, the strain on the rotator cuff is increased all the more. And lowering the barbell to a position on your chest that’s close to your neck is asking for trouble. People who claim that this method of bench pressing has specific benefits for strength, or for stimulating the upper pectorals, haven’t done their homework. Not only are you putting the rotator cuff muscles in a poor position, you’re also making the already tight space in the shoulder joint even tighter. Avoid these two bench press versions.
Deadlift
Shoulder problems arise here when the bar is yanked from the floor. Not only is this hell on the lower back, but the muscles trying to hold your shoulder joint together, and the ones trying to stabilize it, take a beating too. You may be able to lift a bit more weight by jerking at it, but when you injure yourself you won’t be lifting anywhere near that weight for a long time.
Dip
Problems arise here from an extended range of motion, and bouncing. The only thing you’ll stimulate by doing dips to an excessively low position is shoulder strain (and then injury). When the upper arms are parallel with the floor, or slightly below, you’re at the bottom position. It’s not necessary to go so low as to reach the limits of your range of motion in this exercise. Bouncing out of the bottom of the dip hammers the shoulder muscles hard, too. Both of these common technique errors lead to injuries, and when combined you might as well book in for shoulder surgery in advance.
Rows and chins
a) No jerking
These exercises are dangerous when there’s jerking at the bottom position. I’ve seen too many people powering themselves, or the weight, as if they were trying to imitate a piston. Your shoulders don’t appreciate this! The snapping at the bottom does more to induce injury than it does to help you get out an extra rep or two. If you need to do this to complete a set, you’re using too much weight.
b) No over-stretching
Don’t relax into the stretch position of pulldowns, rows or chins. When you do this, you let the small rotator cuff muscles bear the entire weight you’re using as they try and hold the joint together. Don’t go for “a good deep stretch” in the bottom position of these movements. A small stretch is okay, but only so long as you keep the upper-back muscles tight and supporting the weight. Combine this type of lifting with the ballistic rows/chins mentioned above and you’re just asking for an injury.
c) No over-pulling
Don’t try so much to pull your shoulders back at the contracted position of a pulldown, row or chin up that you end up overarching and injuring your middle or lower back. Retraction is one thing, overarching is another. Exaggerating the back arch does not help to train the muscles involved in pulling your shoulders back.
External rotation
Problems arise here when the arms are out to the sides. This type of movement, where you externally rotate the arms while the upper arms are out to the sides, and perpendicular with the floor, has a place in shoulder rehab, but when combined with progressive weight training it can be hazardous. There are even devices out there to aid in this type of movement. With similar dangers to the upright row, it’s a variant of the external rotation exercise to avoid.
CONCLUSION
I’d just like to reiterate that nothing is set in stone. Every person has his/her own unique needs and abilities, and what’s safe for ninety-nine percent of us may be just the thing to wreck your shoulders. On the other hand, what will cripple ninety-nine percent of us may not do you any harm. In the end you’ll need to decide what’s more important: the possible benefits of using an exercise that’s risky for most, or the definite benefits of healthy joints and an extended training life that result from not using risky exercises or variations.
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