Shoulder Health Sunday? Can this be a thing?
.
Today we are going to go over one of many exercises that I started performing that took my shoulder pain from “I can’t even look at a barbell without it hurting” back to benching every other day. Reducing pain with a concentration on the eccentric loading of the tissue.
.
Eccentric loading is when a muscle is contracting against resistance while it lengthens. This is typically the lowering phase of an exercise. Most people can roughly handle 1.5x the amount of weight during this phase compared to the contraction phase. That’s quite a bit more.
.
Eccentric training for subacromial shoulder pain has been shown to produce greater outcomes on pain when compared to general shoulder exercises (Chaconas, Eric J. et al, 2017)
.
In this exercise the band is placed around the foot with the other end held in the hand. Start with my foot up on the bench and the elbow rested against the pad. Rotate the arm keeping the elbow against the pad. Once at end range of motion bring the foot down to the floor. This now adds more resistance throughout the band. Now complete a controlled eccentric phase of the lift while maintaining elbow contact with the pad.
.
Happy Shoulders for Everybody.