Figure this would be worth a quick post so here I am…

One thing that’s worth knowing about me is I’ve always had shoulder issues as long as I can remember. Going back to being 10 years when I separated my left shoulder, then a couple years later when I separated the right one, then a bunch of torn muscles in the left side my senior year of high school, then another separation in my mid 20’s…

I think you get the point. I’ve had a lot of shoulder issues and working around them is a constant battle for me. When I decided to start lifting I started by doing CrossFit. It took about 5 sessions before the 2 main instructors sat me down, asked if I had a history of shoulder issues, then basically told me I’ll never be able to do any meaningful overhead work. I delt with that advice for a while before deciding I felt it was BS, and starting to OHP on my own. Flash forward a year, my “box” had went out of business, I built a home gym and was overhead pressing regularly with no pain. By the way, I’ve strict pressed 225 at 185lbs before, I consider this a strong lift for someone who “shouldn’t do overhead work”.

How does that bring me to today’s post? Every once in a while I do something to flare up my old shoulde injuries and I lose stability in it. The last time it happened I was able to pinpoint exactly what happened, which was catching an axle push press in a bad spot (my 3rd rep of 235×3). This time I just kind of woke up and my shoulder didn’t feel right.

What are the symptoms?

For me I can tell that I need to refocus on my shoulder when my elbow starts to hurt.

Wait… what????

You heard that right. What happens is my shoulder doesn’t stabilize so the job of stability moves to the next joint, which would be my elbow. SOMETIMES, which I capitalized to emphasize it isn’t all the time, I can work through it and I’m fine. Unfortunately I’ve ran into a situation where I need to spend some time focusing on fixing it.

How am I going to fix it?

First of all, I’m not a huge fan of “use light weight only for high reps”. To me that does little for you, I’m more a believer of auto-regulating my main work and adding the necessary movements for rehab on off days.

So on my max effort days I’m still doing max effort work, my numbers will just be lower because you aren’t hitting a true max on an unstable joint. I also need to be mindful to keep telling myself “if this exercise is bothering it, substitute something else”. Within this I may change some of my accessory work to target my mid traps which help to stabilize you shoulders. Different kind of shrugs and band pull aparts can help with this.

I mentioned adding work in on off days (today happens to be one), on these days I’ll do your run of the mill rotator cuff work, scapular pull ups and possibly some light suitcase or waiter carries. Typically after a few weeks of doing these my shoulder begins to stabilize again and things will start working correctly.

Why don’t you always do these movements?

In short I do and I don’t. Running a conjugate program I cycle things in and out. Band pull aparts and face pulls still almost always wind up in my program, as do rotator cuff exercises. The other movements I mentioned, such as scapular pull ups come and go and aren’t always there. By and large with the extensive injury history I have with my shoulders, I do a decent job of keeping them healthy. I will admit, it wouldn’t hurt me to start adding some of these stability drills and exercises into my warm ups.

How will I know its fixed?

For starters, my elbow will stop hurting, that is going to be the top indicator. Aside from that there are two major things I’m looking for:

• My left elbow doesn’t shake or move during my bench press, as of right now its visible
• My bench numbers will shoot up suddenly

Why will my bench numbers shoot up? Because the instability in the joint saps up energy that should be applied to the bar. The last time I went through this my bench went from 325 down to 295 and back up to 325 within a few weeks of doing the shoulder work. So it takes up somewhere in the area of 10% of my benching strength.

In conclusion, it sucks that I have to deal with this but the reality is that once you get passed the “newbie” phase of strength training, you find yourself troubleshooting more than you think you would. Its not always fixing an injury, very often its just fixing a weak point that is holding back one of your lifts. I view this as really what I’m doing now.

Yes my shoulder hurts, but it isn’t really injured, just weaker in certain areas than it should be. I’ll bring it back up to strength and hit a PR. At least that’s the plan…