334 | Our Top Tips to Improve Shoulder Health & Reduce Pain

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Optimal Body Podcast.

[00:00:08] I'm Doc Jen.

[00:00:09] And I'm Dr. Dom.

[00:00:10] And we are doctors of physical therapy, bringing you the body tips and physical therapy pearls

[00:00:13] of wisdom to help you begin to understand your body, relieve your pains and restrictions,

[00:00:18] and answer your questions.

[00:00:19] Along with expert guests, our goal of the Optimal Body Podcast is really to help you

[00:00:24] discover what optimal means within your own body.

[00:00:27] Let's dive in! is made from one simple ingredient is whole 30 approved, paleo-friendly, and made without gluten and dairy. And it's also sourced from the hides of grass-fed pasture-raised bovine to ensure high quality and sustainability of the source of this powerful ingredient. And you get 20 grams of collagen per serving. And it's something that we've had so many people on our podcast come in

[00:01:40] and talk about the importance of getting this collagen.

[00:01:41] And so code optimal 15, that gives you 15% off-site wide on your first purchase.

[00:02:43] in between that we didn't catch when we were just scrolling through our archive of podcasts.

[00:02:45] So if you do have like a specific shoulder thing

[00:02:49] that you're like, you know, I know you guys have talked

[00:02:51] a lot about the shoulder, but I haven't heard about this yet.

[00:02:53] Like let us know.

[00:02:54] Yeah.

[00:02:55] Because we want to be able to create, you know,

[00:02:57] education resources and what the current research is saying

[00:03:00] to what you can be asking in your doctor's office

[00:03:04] or what you can be doing actively for yourself. seems to bring us forward and there isn't many regular daily activities that seem to open us up. And it always comes back to this like repetitive nature of what we're doing, you know, in terms of like you brought up our postures in our everyday life. Well, if I'm always kind of rounded and forward like this with my arm kind of internally rotated,

[00:04:22] it's not only from my shoulder, it's actually from my shoulder blade and my chest and my

[00:04:26] upper back, you know, that starts becomes this whole complex that is kind of intertwined that helps us do all these above head motions or reaching behind our back or reaching over to scratch our head or wash our hair or something like all of these components our shoulder our shoulder blade our upper back are like

[00:05:44] pretty integral to

[00:06:43] is emotion, so we start to lose this general awareness. And that's what we kind of talked about in the hip too.

[00:06:45] It's like it's bringing back the awareness

[00:06:47] of the balance of support throughout our entire muscles

[00:06:52] and our joints, right?

[00:06:53] So it's like if we're only using one part of our system

[00:06:57] over and over and over again,

[00:06:58] of course we're gonna start to develop different pains

[00:07:01] and issues because we're not balancing it out

[00:07:03] with the other side.

[00:07:04] I mean, that's anything we do in life.

[00:07:06] We start to move from the breath in and the breath out. You're going to get that upper back opening as you extend and rotate and you're going

[00:08:20] to help to relax tension around your shoulder.

[00:08:22] Like this is one of the easiest places you can start to help address that upper back,

[00:08:27] rib cage and shoulder blade movement as well as a lot of the thoracic rotation components. Yeah, so you get kind of everything and that's one of the reasons that I love starting to open up the body in this way.

[00:09:40] And you can even pause in that rotation,

[00:09:42] put your arm against the wall, take your chest.

[00:09:43] Do a pec stretch.

[00:09:44] Yeah, do a pec stretch.

[00:09:45] I'll open it up.

[00:09:46] And what you're doing it, you reach one arm up and overhead like touching the opposite shoulder blade

[00:11:00] the other arm is gonna reach behind your back

[00:11:02] and try to touch the opposite shoulder blade.

[00:11:04] Or even like, can overuse my upper trap and my

[00:12:20] upper trap is bad. And your upper trap is part of our optimization episodes are gonna end with, get strong, get strong throughout the movements that you had. Again, this is not an exhaustive list of reasons people develop shoulder issues or exercises that will help optimize your shoulder health that some of our favorites,

[00:13:41] the basic premise is get mobility in all of the areas,

[00:13:45] then start to load or activate through those areas have within that shoulder, both in two-arm pressing, one-arm pressing, pulling, hanging, it's also important. So we just, we want you to encourage you to not stop moving the shoulder in all different ways and not stop getting strong in all different ways.

[00:15:02] Thanks so much for joining us for another episode all about optimizing that shoulder health.

[00:15:04] Remember we have that shoulder plant in the Gen Health

[00:15:07] membership and if you wanna try that out,