Shoulder Rehabilitation Exercises Should be for Everyone

By: Nick Bryant Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Never mind waiting until you mess up your shoulder, you need to start working on your shoulders before anything goes wrong. I'm not talking about lifting weights and exercising the already dominant muscles, I'm talking about waking up the rotator cuff muscles before something goes wrong.

I recently damaged one of the muscles in my rotator cuff, ended up with an impinged shoulder and was told that I would need surgery to correct it. It was then that I started to take an interest and research the subject of shoulder injuries and found out that most of us ignore this group of muscles until it is too late, me included. It was shoulder rehabilitation exercises that enabled me to get over my rotator cuff injury without surgery.

A lot of shoulder rehabilitation exercises are aimed at strengthening the rotator cuff, an important but often neglected group of muscles simply because they are so key to a healthy shoulder.

The shoulder is comprised of a shallow ball and socket joint held together by tendons, ligaments, cartiladge and seventeen different muscles. Its complex make up gives us the range of movement that we have but can also leave us prone to injury. The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles which pull the arm into the shoulder and help to prevent dislocation.

This group of muscles can become weak, through injury, neglect or genereal wear and tear and when it does, it leaves us at greater risk of many different shoulder injuries. Just a few quick and easy exercises aimed at this group of muscles will improve your shoulder health and help to prevent injury in just ten minutes a day.

Even if the rotator cuff is healthy, building it up will improve the overall performance of your shoulders. If you do lift weights you'll find that a strong rotator cuff can dramatically increase the weights you can lift

Around a third of us will get a rotator cuff problem at some point in our lives. As you age the risk becomes higher so it is well worth working on the rotator cuff muscles to help keep your shoulder joint healthy.

Now there is a fair chance that if you are reading this article, it is because it is loo late to save you. I didn't even know about these muscles until I injured them. Most of us take our good health for granted until something happens. I am no different.

Okay, if you have managed to hurt one of yoru shoulders then shoulder rehabilitation exercises are going to be somewhere in the therapy.

If you have undergone surgery then the advice will almost certainly be to get your shoulder moving just as soon as possible to avoid frozen shoulder or loss of movement. Obviously, if you have had surgery then you need to follow your doctor's advice on when to start exercise.

Shoulder exercises will not involve great weights or resistance. They tend if anything to use either small weights or just the natural resistance of yoru arm and will involve very gentle movements to start with that gradually increase in terms of frequency and difficulty until the shoulder is back to normal. If you feel pain at any time then you need to stop as this is usually an indication of damage being inflicted.

But before you start to exercise a damaged shoulder let it rest, treat any inflammation and pain with pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs but most important of all is to allow it to heal properly. If you ignore shoulder pain you are likely to make the situation worse. A pulled or slightly damaged muscle that is ignored can result in a major injury needing surgery and months of rehab.

Better still, look after your shoulders before they let you down and whatever you do keep up the exercises after your shoulder is fixed.

Article Source: ABC Article Directory

About The Author: Nick Bryant is an older dad to a young family who suffered a torn rotator cuff which he was told would require surgery to correct. After reading up on the condition he successfully managed a full recovery with just rest and shoulder rehabilitation exercises Read his full story at his blog www..myrotatorcuffcure.blogspot.com