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» Weekly Cup of Joe - Episode #13 - Shoulder Pain - Stretching & Posture Exercises
Weekly Cup of Joe - Episode #13 - Shoulder Pain - Stretching & Posture Exercises

Weekly Cup of Joe - Episode #13 - Shoulder Pain - Stretching & Posture Exercises

Read the transcript for this video:

Good morning, everyone and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. This week, we're going to be talking about shoulder issues. Had lots of questions in regards to shoulder stuff coming in. So one of my former clients Jimmy wrote in and said, "How do I know if it's a shoulder pain or neck pain? I thought I had shoulder problems, but then somebody--- a friend of mine--- said, well, maybe it's your neck." And it's a great question, Jimmy. Probably over the last, at least 13 years that we've opened, I've had the clinic but after 23 years of treating, I'd say at least 50% of our shoulder clients have some sort of neck component. Your neck is right here and your shoulder is right there and they're very closely related. So if one is hurting, then sometimes a lot of times the other component is hurting as well. So one of the biggest things we have to do is be able to differentiate that.

So that's a great question. And, one of the biggest things we want to look at is that posture and you've heard it before, is that well, over 50% of our clients too, have some sort of neck component going on with a shoulder issue and they may have a really true neck component or they have some arthritis, a bad disc, or it's a segment is actually locked up. That may be truly happening in the neck and that's causing some of their shoulder pain or related to their shoulder pain as well. Or it could be just that they have bad posture and show that from the side here, where we have a forward head and rounded shoulders and are slouched back and we're in the computer. So we have some really bad posture, which is contributing to our shoulder pain. We may not really have much neck pain, but we have really bad shoulder pain, but it's because of that. Forward head, rounded shoulders, bad posture. And so, with all our clients, neck typically, and as well as shoulder where we start with is posture. So we work on getting our clients into a much better posture; being aware of their posture so we have them sitting up. And what we do is we line up ear holes, with the mid of our shoulders, with the mid of our trunks, in the hips but we want to be in a good position where we're lining those up. Nice straight line, ear holes, shoulders mid of the trunk of hips. We understand that you can't be in this position 24 hours a day because we're going to go out to hear what's going to happen, that's your preferred position; this is habitual. But if you can set your alarm on your computer for every 20 or 30 minutes to go off and you can then go from here to here, woo! Awesome! Now I'm doing better. So I am repositioning more frequently throughout the day and I'm taking stress off my neck and my shoulder. So that's the first and foremost that we want you to do.

The next thing that you can do is just do some easy stretching. I'm going to show you here real quick. Get in the doorway here, I'm going to show you a couple of different angles. So now everybody here is the doorway you can find during the day, open doorway; going to your break room, in your office, go to the bathroom, stairwell. Most people are working from home now, so you've got lots of doorways of the privacy, your own home. So you just have to go to a doorway frequently throughout the day, and you can stretch out your chest muscles. That's the biggest part of that rounding forward position to try to help us open things up. So we put our hands on the sides of the door here. So hands stay down low, good posture, and you step forward with either leg. It doesn't matter what leg you stand forward with. You go stepping forward with your hands on the side, you can choose your left to your right, you want to stay in a good upright position. The biggest thing is, and I'm going to show you from the side here, as you can see this as well as I'm standing in the doorway here, still standing in my good upright position and I'm stepping forward into the doorway. We do that with our hands down low, and then we can also do our hand's chest height or shoulder height; whatever's comfortable to us. Hands can be a little wider, can be right on the door frame; wherever's comfortable, nice and easy.

And when we're stretching, we're deep breathing, we're relaxing; we're not creating pain. The no pain, no gain theory does not work, we want to gently stretch out those muscles. So you want to be able to deep breathe and relax while you're doing it you're holding each stretch for about 30 seconds. You're doing each stretch three or four times, and you're going to do those stretches two to three times a day. So, you can find those doorways two to three times during the day, arms down, arms up high, roughly three times, four times each stretch, approximately 30 seconds for each stretch and no pain, deep breathing, relaxing; really work on stretching that out. And then you're working on your posture throughout the day. The alarm goes off, we keep resetting our posture. You do that for a few weeks and you'll notice a big difference we have clients say all the time that 50% of their pain or their complaints will go away just by working on their posture and stretching. Not all their pain will go away, but about 50% of their pain will go away. So, it's a great start. So try those things first and see how they go. You can always call the clinic if you have any questions.

I do want to leave you a thought for the day or thought for the week, different things we work on. And one of the things I want you to think about this week is I'm really not to judge someone too quickly. Don't be too quick to judge. I want to think about putting myself in their shoes. Somebody cuts you off driving wise, somebody comes in and barges in front of you in the checkout line at target, whatever may happen, just take a deep breath, step back, put yourself into their shoes and don't be too quick to judge because you may be in their position if we don't know what's going on in their minds and their worlds at this point in time. So just think about that for the week and see how that goes and see if it changes your mindset on how we treat people. Thank you very much. Hope you guys learned something this week and until I see you again next Wednesday for your Weekly Cup of Joe.

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