7 Best Treatments For Pain Relief From A Shoulder Labrum Tear

Labrum tear in the shoulder can heal naturally if the right treatment is done. In this video, I’ll be showing you seven of my best treatments for healing a shoulder labrum tear without surgery, be sure to watch to the end of the video because I’ll be covering a few things that definitely make a shoulder labrum tear worse.

Number one, get a shoulder sling like this one, you just stick your elbow into it, get it over your shoulder and get support for your labrum because when you do this, you allow the labrum to begin to heal back against the bone where it should be that way you can get the best function out of your shoulder for the long term.

I’ve got a video down in the description below that shows you exactly how to put this on in the best position for your shoulder labrum.

Number two is used arm rests wherever you can or make arm rests wherever you can. And what I mean by that is if you’re sitting in a chair, make sure you have the armrests shoving your shoulders all the way up so that it shoves the ball up into the socket.

This connects the labrum back against the bone and the more time you can spend in that position, the better you’re going to heal in your torn labrum. If you don’t have armrests, lean on the desk, lean on a table. If you’re eating a meal, make sure you lean your upper body weight through your elbows so that it shoves your shoulders up. You can do this too aggressively. So just make sure that it doesn’t hurt your shoulders.

It should feel relieving and comfortable. I instruct all my shoulder labrum tear patients to sit on the couch with pillows under their elbows to shove them up so that they can get nice and comfortable to enjoy some television and movie or YouTube.

Number three is resting. Now this goes along with using the sling and armrests. But what I mean that’s different from the other two is that people tend to overdo it whenever they have a shoulder labrum tear. Because once the pain starts to get under control, it’s less than less.

The more you use the sling and you lean on armrests, the pain starts to go away and you feel tremendously better then people start to overdo it. But you have to realize that the labrum is made from cartilage. And so it just takes a long time to heal. So you have to take it easy for weeks, usually at least a month, if not two months.

And you can know that you overdid it, if you start to have pain in your shoulder again, if you’ve been improving, and then you go do something that kind of makes your shoulder hurt, it makes it achy again, at the end of the day, or maybe you’re having pain at night again, then that activity was too much.

And you need to rest from doing that activity, either cut it out or reduce it and find the right amount that you can do without aggravating your shoulder joints.

Number four is use a shoulder pulley system like this to get your full range of motion going up overhead. Doing overhead exercise is a good thing at the right time for a shoulder labrum tear. And using a device like this helps you to get there safely.

If when you reach up, you shrug your shoulder and use your other hand to assist on the way up, you can get up all the way safely without aggravating your labrum. I’ve got a video showing you exactly how to use this how to set this all up. And the link to this in the description below.

I usually start my clients out with doing 10 to 20 reps of this exercise and then build them up to where they’re going for five minutes, even 1020 or 30 minutes per day, depending on what they can tolerate without making the shoulder hurt more. But you might get some muscle sore along the way.

That’s okay, as long as the actual shoulder joint does not hurt more than your labrum should be safe. The fifth treatment is called Angry cats. And this exercise requires you to be feeling a lot better and your shoulder labrum you should have gotten into control with all the previous things I talked about. If you can tolerate putting weight through your arms, then you’re ready to do this exercise.

It looks like this. You’re getting your hands and knees, you can do this on the floor on your bed. Put your fists like so or you could be flat handed whatever is comfortable for your hands and wrists like this. Then you push your backup like an angry cat, just like that. And you’re going to hold it for 10 seconds, and then relax and come up like that this is a yoga move by the way.

But it’s great at getting your shoulder blades to move properly and putting some light pressure through your shoulder joint and gently very gently stressing the newly formed connection between your labrum and your bone without your full body weight. And you can always play with the percentage of body weight that you’re putting through your arms.

Say with my left arm here, that’s the injured side, I can lean away from that side so that I’m putting very mild pressure through it. Or you can lean more onto it. If you’re if you’re ready for that we can also lean on your legs more or onto your arms more to get more pressure. And you can do this standing as well by leaning on the surface that you’re planning on leaning on and you can still do the same motion with your shoulders while not having to put pressure to your knees.

It’s important to get your shoulders to round out all the way forward. And then to just relax. You don’t have to go all the way back. This exercise is best if you can do 20 to 30 reps holding each one for two 10 seconds, as long as it feels comfortable to do so otherwise stop when you need to. And then you need to do four to five sets a day.

So you kind of need to do a lot, you’re trying to get to about 100 or so reps, holding each one for 10 seconds. But I tell people all the time, if all you can hold is two or three seconds, six or seven seconds, then just do that and get the practice so that you can gradually work up to holding a full 10 seconds.

Next for number six, we have a progression of that exercise that angry cat exercise. This is another yoga move, it’s called the child’s pose, I like to rock back and forth in it to get motion through the joint. So you’re going to get the same exact position. And now instead of pushing up and holding there, you’re going to push up hold there and sit back in this direction.

Now Childs pose your all the way down like this. But for the purposes of this exercise, I want you to keep your fists just like so your hands flat, if you want to do it that way, and push this way and you try to round out your back to get your shoulder joint aligned properly, to get the ball to seat into the socket to take pressure off the labrum in a bad way.

But put pressure on it in a good way, the way that it’s supposed to accept pressure. When you push your shoulder blades forward like that, you get good alignment through the ball and socket joint. And that pressure is good for the health of the labrum in the long term. Now from here, you’re going to do 20 to 30 reps just sit back and forth, you’re just rocking back and forth.

Some people like to hold and even stretch a bit here, that’s fine, as long as you get all the reps in. And then like the angry cat exercise, you’re going to do four to five sets a day so that you’re hitting about 100 or more reps, if possible.

The seventh exercise is a shrugging exercise. And this is going to be a little tougher for the shoulder, especially as you progress this exercise to a full on overhead reach. So you start with your elbows against the wall like this, make sure to keep your head and neck in a slight double chin. And then you’re going to shrug all the way but with your arms in the wall.

So it looks like this. And you’re holding it up as high as you can, you might get a popper click I just did in my collarbone. I felt it, hold it there for 10 seconds and just avoid letting your head move in this way where you’re where your chin juts out like that or so people like to bring their head forward and down, you have to keep your head in the same position that you started. Hold it for 10 seconds like that and really shrug and get these shrugging muscles on both sides to work really well. You might even get sore there.

If you haven’t done any exercising those muscles for a long time, hold it for 10 seconds, do about 10 reps. And then you want to do this for five sets a day so that you get to 40 or 50 reps. If you can even progress towards 100 reps, I would encourage you to do so as long as it’s not too much soreness too much work for your shoulders for your shrugging muscles.

And of course, it’s not bothering your labrum your shoulder joint, you should have no side effects to this besides just your typical muscle soreness, and you’re expecting to have it up here in the shrugging area. And as you get better at this, you want to raise the arms up in the wall.

So instead of being at about this level, where your elbows about even with your shoulder joint, then you’ll reach up a bit and shrug from there. And eventually your elbows will come off the wall, just your hands touching the wall, shrug from there, and then you can even just come off the wall completely and shrug without using the wall.

At that point you’re using the entire body weight of your arms against your shrugging muscles. After that, you’re probably ready to do some weights if you can tolerate doing that without any shoulder problems. And that’s good because it’s going to bring good stress to the labrum where it connects to the bone that newly formed connection that you’ve gone through over the past few months so that you can strengthen it and prepare it for higher level activities.

So you can keep strong and healthy for the long term in your shoulder joints. Next, let me show you a few things that are commonly done by healthcare professionals are recommended for people that have shoulder labrum tears that I think are a bad idea.

And you know, people out there healthcare professionals that are guiding their patients to do these are they really have the best intent for their patients, they just aren’t experts at healing a labrum tear naturally, they’re usually experts at healing a labrum tear with surgery.

And it’s a different process than when I’m taking you through here today. So I want you to be aware of these so that you don’t start to do these exercises in expectation for it’s improve your shoulder labrum tear, but it actually might make it feel worse.

The first one is shoulder stretches anything that is an arranged like where you push your arm across your body, or you get up against the wall and stretch your arm back this way. Or sometimes people get in a corner and bring their arms back this way and really try to stretch out the chest muscles and the shoulder joints.

Those types of stretches really take that ball and socket joint to the end ranges and can tear the labrum more because that labrum surrounds the socket and if you’re pulling the ball up against that labrum that’s already torn and detached from the bone on the socket that it can further stretch it away from the socket you don’t want that second is shoulder rotation exercises.

Now these are commonly done with a band like a rubber band, usually big Having different colors like yellow, red, green, and blue. And people will have you tied up to a doorknob or a post something sturdy like a pole from an exercise frame. And they’ll turn this way away from the wall, and then they’ll have you turn around and pull the other way in this direction away.

Sometimes this exercise is taught with a weight in your hand and you’re lying on your side, and you’re rotating your arm up this way, or lying on your shoulder and then rotating the other direction in order to use gravity in the weight.

These exercises are not good for shoulder labrum tears, because they’re working the rotator cuff muscles that are producing rotation at the ball and socket joints. And that motion of rotation of the ball on the socket tends to aggravate the edges of the ball and socket. The reason for this is because the rotator cuff muscles are usually part of the muscle imbalance.

And if you’re working the wrong muscles, the ones that are already strong, you’re potentially going to further push the ball off the socket and ruin the mechanics at the shoulder joints. Now right after surgery may be necessary for you to do those exercises, because you need to wake up the rotator cuff muscles and those exercises could be beneficial for that.

But if you’re trying to prevent surgery, not the best idea, another exercise that’s pretty painful for most shoulder labrum tears is raises like this where you hold weights in your hand and you’re picking up your arms, it could be straightforward, or out to the sides or anywhere in between these exercises put a lot of stress, especially if you’re holding weights, it puts a lot of stress on the ball and socket joints, anything that increases the lever.

So in other words, if you’re holding a weight out here in your hand, that’s a long lever for this little ball and socket joint to have to take that’s a lot of stress a lot of bad forces that can potentially be going through that labrum. If it’s not stable, because your labor was torn, you’re going to potentially aggravate the labrum.

So going through the exercises and treatment like I showed you early on in this video are going to be better places to start than with the rotator cuff exercises, these raises and stretches. Now the last thing that I think is a good idea to try to avoid is surgery.

Now surgery sometimes is absolutely necessary for a labrum tear but most of the time it can be avoided if you go to the right process for fixing the root problem of the shoulder.

So of course talk to your surgeon see what they have to say you might try looking at our videos here in fact, we’ve got a playlist of all our shoulder labrum exercises and videos tips advice down in the description below so that you can get a good idea for everything I have to say about shoulder labrum tears.

Go through that and see if you can begin to get your shoulder labrum tear better naturally so that you can avoid having a surgery.

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