EUGENIZATION.

It’s often said that living a healthy lifestyle means staying active. Well, with springtime comes flights of fancy, rebirth, and (of course) spring sports, like golf and tennis. Along with spring sports comes their corresponding injuries and over the next few weeks I’d like to offer up some strategies to prevent these from becoming chronic problems.

Today’s installment: The Rotator Cuff.

1. Directly strengthen the external rotators.

First, some quick anatomy. The rotator cuff is a group of 4 muscles that act to hold your arm in your shoulder socket. They also have some secondary functions, namely internal and external rotation of the humerus (upper arm bone). Before your eyes glaze over, it’s important that we make this distinction because in training the rotator cuff, we only want to strengthen those muscles that perform external rotation, not the internal rotators (in fact, strengthening those may increase your chance of injury).

The external rotators are commonly overworked, since they have to resist the much more powerful pec major and latissimus dorsi groups (which also contribute to internal rotation).

The best way to work the external rotators is through (you guessed it) resisted external rotation. You can use either dumbbells or a band or cable machine to perform these exercises (follow links for examples).

2. Remember to keep the shoulders “tight.”

Hey, doing presses or pulls? Keep your shoulders tight - meaning, slightly retract and depress your shoulder blades. I cue my clients by saying:

“Keep your shoulders down. Pretend you’re squeezing a tangerine between your shoulder blades.”

Why tangerines? Because I like them. And because they’re small enough to have my clients do what I want them to do - squeeze the shoulder blades together.

Keeping the shoulder muscles “tight” activates the larger muscles of the shoulder girdle (deltoids, lats, pecs), which takes a great deal of stress off of the smaller, weaker rotator cuff muscles. In fact, if you do this:
your poor rotator cuff muscles are taking 100% of the strain of your bodyweight. Ouch.

Remember, keep those shoulders tight!

3. Adjust range of motion on upper body exercises so as not to compromise the rotator cuff.
It’s not just the stretched position on pull ups that you’ve got to be careful. That goes for the stretched starting positions of pushes as well - most notably, the bench press.

The starting position in the above picture sucks. Don’t allow your elbows to fall below the line of your body (i.e., less than a 90 degree bend), else you risk some serious shoulder trouble in the long-term. No, it won’t make you less of a man (or woman) not to bench all the way to your chest. Not being able to put on your jacket because of rotator cuff impingement syndrome, however, may cramp your style a bit.

4. Strengthen supporting muscle groups.

Like the deltoids, for example. Having strong shoulder muscles will go a long way in helping to improve the longevity of your rotator cuff. After all, someone’s got to take the strain when you return your opponent’s 107 mph serve or swing for that 350 yard drive.

5. Allow for adequate recovery of the rotator cuff muscles.
It’s quite easy to overwork the rotator cuff muscles since they’re involved in just about every single upper body movement. It’s not uncommon to see a recreational tennis player have an exercise schedule arranged so that they’re using their shoulders everyday (remember, tennis matches count towards “shoulder work” as well). If possible, see if you can consolidate your exercise routines so that you leave at least a day of rest inbetween (this includes matches and practices). Monitor and guard against the signs of overtraining: nagging little twinges that won’t go away, unusual soreness, etc. If you feel you’re going too far, back off.Life’s too short to sit on the sidelines because of an injury. Play it smart!

Besides, if you hurt your shoulder, I won’t be able to have you press heavy for awhile.