Shoulder injuries happen when someone has done something like skiing, bicycling, or other activity. When you have somebody with a shoulder injury to handle, there’s not much else to do but rest it up so that the muscle starts repairing itself again. Injury Rehab is one of the areas that Tim Vagen has gotten into over the years. He has been a strength coach for 26 years and works in clinical rehab settings. His background started at the San Francisco sports Institute, doing spine rehab and developing stabilization protocols. He originally started with his work in the NFL. And he led toward working with the injured clients and then went to more of a clinical.
He had A lot of experience working with various athletes of current specialties, including swimmers. Also, he had 15 athletes go to the Olympic trials and come home with a couple of medals and ethics. Lastly, he works with volleyball players, working with shoulder and shoulder athletes.
Tim Vagen on Tips for the Fitness professional on Shoulder Injuries
CLICK HERE to watch the video with Tim Vagen on tips for fitness professionals when working with shoulder injuries
Training with Athletes
Suppose you’re a swimmer, volleyball player, or tennis player. There’s a chance of injury because of all the movements involved in their sport. Swimmers have many different injuries, not just from overheads that are still not done perfectly or all the time even though coaches tell them how to do it correctly.
Overcoming Shoulder Injuries
You need to make sure all the suitable structures are in place. It might boil down to mobility, stability, and what’s on with your shoulder. When we start looking at these different factors that support a client’s day during exercise or movement, it becomes essential for them to have good thoracic mobility.
One of the critical things people forget about with the shoulder is working on the thoracic mobility and ensuring they can flex and rotate with that thoracic spine to let the scapula be stable and the muscles work correctly. And therefore, what you want, your scapulars are stable.
Without good mobility, you’re to get a lot of excess motion. However, if the scapula doesn’t ‘have it correctly, that will cause problems with the glenohumeral joint at the central part of your shoulder, and it will do whatever it can to make up for that lost movement. It is to ensure all structures before proceeding with this operation.
How to Avoid Shoulder Injuries?
You must do everything right and ensure the mechanics are correct; you need reasonable scapular control and avoid too much joint movement or injury. It would help if you let your rotator cuff take care of it while allowing the big muscles to do their job.
To avoid shoulder injuries, do everyday exercises. Start with easier ones such as daily exercises, and progress until you’re ready for more strenuous activities.
After rehabilitation, injury rehab has things to offer to clients who had an old injury in their shoulder and what they can do to help make sure it gets better. Sometimes people go into the gym with that old injury because it irritates them.
Tim Vagen on Why Stretching the Shoulder Maybe Not What is Needed
CLICK HERE to watch the video of Tim Vagen chatting about scapular stabilization exercises
Cardiovascular strength and flexibility are two key components of fitness. You can take a more advanced approach by looking at mobility in the thoracic spine when it comes to basic movements or push-ups, noticing errors with training through your client’s thoracic spine. All professionals must add some range of motion exercises into their program, even if they are starting!
Common thinking is categorized into cardiovascular strength and flexibility for fitness professionals. You must look at mobility for the thoracic spine and incorporate various movements with the client.
Thoracic Mobility Exercises
When we use the term mobilization, people start immediately thinking that it’s a big advanced topic and that’s something that physiotherapists should be doing. But in our case, when we’re talking about mobility, we talk about getting that thoracic spine.
In noticing errors in movement within the thoracic spine, the fitness professional needs to add some thoracic range of motion exercises to their program. You may start with a light warm-up, or maybe even do some tissue or console role before that. Then, you could use foam roll to do some extensions.
One of the tricks with the thoracic spine is taping two tennis balls together, putting them on the thoracic spine, and rocking back and forth the flection extension motion.
One way to stretch the thoracic spine is by getting on a stability ball, placing your hands behind your head with elbows flared out, and then rocking side to side. This will give you better mobility when extending the thoracic spine. When you run into problems in the gym, whether the lower back or your shoulder, you need to know how to do those movements
Often, some mobility in your hip will cause compensations up the spine. And it is a bit of an advanced tab topic, but when you think about how the body moves if the hips don’t have very well, the low backs make up that movement. And when the lower back makes up that movement, the thoracic spine will not move. Then you hit the scapular areas. They’re re-stabilizing, and they’re revving perhaps too much. And then again, it’s getting stuck at the end of the chain.
What are the Different Shoulder Exercises?
When we talk about shoulder exercise, some of the great activities we try to do are dumbbells, spies, and various things in different motions. For the fitness professional, if you have to do overhead movements such as shoulder or push presses, the risk tends to want us to automate a little. Our goal is to work the shoulder naturally. So when you’re doing overhead stuff, use dumbbells or kettlebells. The kettlebell forces a significant amount of scapular stabilization.
For people with tight shoulders, the glenohumeral joint moves too much, and they have a hypermobile shoulder, but because it moves too much, they can’t control it and get an excellent full range of motion. They need to stretch things out a little bit. IIt’s’st necessarily the shoulder. They might need to work on that. Maybe a stretch, some other areas.
To get more info on Tim Vagen, visit Unlimited Athlete. Tim will be at the NSCA Washington State Annual Fall Clinic.
Suspension Training Exercises for a Shoulder Injury
