Regarding shoulder injury prevention from a clinician’s perspective, it’s refreshing to see the rotator cuff receiving more awareness by regular gym-goers. More people are realizing, albeit through guilt, that it needs to be trained to help protect their shoulders. Here’s the problem. I’m starting to get this feeling that people treat rotator cuff training like an after-thought. For example, they’ll warm it up 1-2 times per week to prepare for a workout. Other times, they’ll do it wrong and work an unintended muscle. Something is better than nothing, but this won’t maximally keep your rotator cuff healthy.
The reason I think we went wrong with this is simply that most of us don’t understand the role of the rotator cuff. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t expect you to understand it right away. It took years of school and rehab training for me to realize how much the rotator cuff actually does for us. Here’s why they’re important – we only have one bone that connects our arm to the rest of the body. Better yet, it’s one of the more commonly broken bones. It’s called the collar bone because it attaches to your neck like a collar. You might know someone who’s broken this while snowboarding or taking a tackle playing football. Apart from this commonly broken bone, our rotator cuff is what holds our shoulder into its socket.
It begins to make sense why you can move your shoulder so much when you consider its lack of “boney-ness”. But we need something that can permit the shoulder to move while offering support when necessary. That’s where your rotator cuff comes in. So…
Lesson 1
Our shoulders always rely on these muscles: hence, your rotator cuff muscles are endurance muscles. And you probably guessed it – you’ll need high reps with relatively low weight to hit these muscles properly. The intended purpose of developing rotator cuff strength is to improve its integrity and get it firing when you need it most.
Lesson 2
The rotator cuff isn’t a group of muscles, and why should they be? If you try isolating the rotator cuff by exercising it, you’ll notice that you can’t move much weight. In fact, 9 times out of 10 I know someone is doing their exercise properly when this happens! It’s when you start recruiting other stronger muscles like your traps, triceps, and forearms that you can move more weight. Don’t get me wrong though. Eventually, you want to be at the point where you can use your rotator cuff muscles in perfect harmony with the rest of these muscles (e.g. like seen in a ball-throwing motion).
How to begin activating your Rotator Cuff
Start with the basics – learn how to isolate them. This also coincides with “man, this feels weird” or “wow I can barely move this weight”, or better yet “I can’t rotate my arm that much”. It’s all good though, don’t worry too much about that! The goal at the beginning of rotator cuff physiotherapy is to improve your awareness of the muscle and learn how to contract it in the first place!
We recommend using light resistance and cueing the shoulder to move in a certain pattern that isolates your rotator cuff. Eventually, we’d progress this by adding more weight and/or using increasingly difficult angles. For the latter, the rotator cuff is easier to isolate with your elbow tucked at your side vs. your elbow elevated at 90 degrees. Finally, you want to transition rotator cuff training from basic one-plane movements to more functional multi-plane movements. This involves activating your rotator cuff muscles with other muscles in multi-angled push, pulls, twists, etc.
How about we start bulletproofing the rotator cuff? Reasons to do so are not limited to but include injury prevention, performance optimization, and better overall understanding of shoulder dynamics. Until next time, let’s continue fueling your rehab and performance the right way!
Excellent post!