Weight Training with Shoulder Pain/Impingement (Fix It)

Weight training with shoulder pain/ impingement

The longer we workout, the more it’s bound to happen; one of our shoulders is going to get cranky and impinged.

I have trouble with an impingement in my one shoulder because I broke my Collar bone, and the way it healed has left less room in-between the shoulder joint and bone that runs over the top of it called the acromion [uh-kroh-mee-uh]. In between this space is where the supra-spin-a-tus tenon runs, attaching our upper arm to our scapula.

An impingement is when this tenon becomes compressed and inflamed. Depending on our body positioning, the size of the space it runs through changes.

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The way most people end up getting an impingement is through poor posture or an overuse injury, like lifting heavy objects overhead regularly.

At first, you might only feel a small amount of pain in your shoulder. Listen to this warning sign and give your shoulder a little bit of time to heal up. You can do this by adjusting the way you train, or if it’s bad enough, you may need to give it a break from training. If you don't, it’ll only get worse, and you’ll have to take more time off in the future.

Don’t feel like you can’t continue to train the healthy shoulder while resting the injured one. They did a interesting study on forearms that showed the benefits of continuing to train the uninjured limb.

What they did is they immobilized one forearm of all the participants and split them into 2 groups. The first group trained their free forearm while the other group didn't train at all, and after four weeks, the group that trained kept all their original muscle size and strength in the immobilized arm, with the non-training group losing both size and strength.

Now it's best to keep ourselves from having an injury in the first place. And this is where good programming comes in. If we have been focusing on our pushing movements doing more sets of bench and shoulder press, Then our pulling exercises like rows and face pulls. This sets us up for a shoulder impingement by causing our shoulders to round forward with a tight over developed chest, and our underdeveloped back is too weak to pull them into proper positioning.

To help pull our shoulders back into place, I like to do I’s Y’s and T’s.

You have to check your ego at the door for this exercise as you don't need to use heavy weights. In some cases, the weight of your arms may be enough.

You do this exercise while lying face down on a bench with the beach adjusted high enough that your arms hang down freely, not touching the floor. The first rep, you lift your arms straight up in front of you, making an I. For the next one, you raise your arms up in a Y shape, and for the last rep, you bring your arms straight out to your sides, making the T shape.

I like to do this as part of my mobility warm-up at the beginning of my workout.

If you have a posture problem, the next thing you will want to do is increase the amount of pulling exercises you do. So for every pushing exercise, add in at least two pulling movements.

Not all pulling exercises are suitable for an impinged shoulder, in particular pull-ups. The prone hand position with our arms overhead shrinks the size of the opening between the shoulder joint and the acromion [uh-kroh-mee-uh]. By simply moving our hands into a neutral position or, even better yet, switching to a supinated grip and doing a chin-up will increase the size of the space and alleviate pain.

This applies to shoulder presses as well, and even incline presses using a neutral grip will reduce the chance of your shoulder tenon becoming compressed and inflamed.

A fantastic exercise for the upper chest that eliminates the need to push in an overhead angle reducing the odds of an overuse injury is the reverse grip bench press. It works the upper pecs while keeping your shoulder in a much more favourable position.

Mixing up these different hand positions throughout your workouts will help to keep you from getting an overuse injury.

Changing around your hand positions will work the muscles differently. To find out how to use these positions with the dumbbell bench press to get complete chest development while protecting yourself from injury, watch this video next and keep working out while having fun

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.00971.2017