Top 5 Rotator Cuff Tear Exercises To Actually Help Heal And Avoid Surgery

Rotator cuff tears can heal naturally without surgery. If you do the right exercises, most healthcare professionals focus on rotation exercises in the shoulder. And really, they’re missing the boat, they need to be working on exercises that move the shoulder blade because that’s the base or the foundation for the ball and socket joint.

In this video, I’m going to show you five exercises that you need to begin to do to get your rotator cuff tear under control and improving naturally so that you don’t have to ever worry about getting a surgery. And this first exercise, you’re going to do some rotation. And that’s the only time I recommend rotation. And it’s not against any resistance.

Besides a little bit of gravity, most healthcare professionals are giving you a lot of resistance or giving you a resistance band to move in this direction. Or they’re having to do it with a cable lifting weights or even a free weight line on your side. I think this is inappropriate, because it puts way too much pressure on the rotator cuff tear.

So you need to make sure that you do it without any weight, just like I’m going to show you lie down on your back and get a pillow under your elbow on the side that’s affected. Do whatever you want with your legs just get comfortable. And ideally, you should be at 90 degrees. But if you if that hurts your shoulder, it’s okay to be less than 90 degrees, right here in this angle.

And then all you’re going to do is rotate in your shoulder through the amount of motion that you feel comfortable. And take your time, this should not be tiring at all, it should not burn. And you’re barely even going to feel your muscles work.

The point of this exercise is to get the ball and socket to settle in a much better alignment, so that you can move on to other exercises that are going to improve the overall muscle balance around your ball and socket joint and take pressure off your rotator cuff tear. So you’re going to do is take your time going forward and backwards.

In ranges of motion that are comfortable with literally all you can do is this do that what you usually find after doing this for a minute or two is that the motion begins to increase. And as you do this frequently throughout the day, it definitely improves and it calms down your rotator cuff because it’s allowing your rotator cuff muscles to begin to work like rotator cuff muscles, which are they’re designed to stabilize and compress the ball into the socket, you’re not being forceful at all.

So it’s easy on them, I recommend doing this for a minute or two at a time 30 to 60 reps is all you would need to do. And do this frequently. Especially if your rotator cuff tear is aggravated if your shoulder hurts right now, you need to be doing this like every hour while you’re awake. There’s a seated version of this, it’s not as good in my opinion as the one line down that I just showed you.

But you can sit up and rest your elbow on something like a desk, an armrest, if you’re sitting at home on a couch, get a pillow under you, the idea is to get enough of something under use so that it supports your elbow very well, you’re not having to reach down to get to it as if I were to lean on this table and having a kind of reach down. So you want to get something under and then you just do the same rotation.

From there, you just turn out and in really nice and easy. There’s no elbow motion in this, some people like to kind of straighten out their elbow and bend it like this and they’re not doing shoulder rotation at that moment. You’re trying to rotate inwards and outwards real nice, same frequency, you’re doing it for a minute or two at a time throughout the day, every hour to help calm down your shoulder joints.

And one key thing one big mistake people make, you need to keep your shoulder in good alignment. So keep your elbow kind of ahead of your body not behind your body like this. If you rotate from back here, that can put some bad pressure on the rotator cuff tear up in your shoulder. So just make sure that your elbows a little bit ahead of the plane of your body right here and just rotate in that direction.

The second exercise you need to be doing to help your rotator cuff tear heal naturally and avoid surgery is this angry cat rocking exercise. Some people say it looks like the child’s pose from yoga, it kind of looks that way too. But do it just like I’m telling you so that you can get the forces just right on your shoulder.

You’re going to get on your hands and knees just like this and you can get on your fists or your hands so that you’re comfortable in your wrists. Once you find the best position for you, then what you’ve got to do here is push your back up as much as possible.

So it’s as if you’re pushing your hands down into the floor of the bed wherever you’re doing this and you’re trying to arch your back up the upper part of your back and you’re trying to push those shoulder blades forward on your body.

As long as it doesn’t hurt your shoulder to do this, then go as far up as you can. If it does hurt a bit, just do what you can comfortably so go 50% or 70% or even just 10% of what you can do without pain. And then once you get to that right percentage intensity of pushing your backup sit back, push your bottom towards your heels and you’re still pushing into the table or the floor wherever you are, and then rock back up still pushing down with your backup and then relax right here.

Repeat that 30 to 60 times, some people like to hold it when they get to the back position, so they’ll go up right here. And then they’ll stay here just because it feels good on their shoulder, that’s fine, you can hold it if you want.

But that motion of pushing your shoulders forward and getting your back away from the from the surface that you’re on, is doing a lot of good for aligning the ball and socket joint without stressing the rotator cuff tendons.

This is also getting you to move in directions that you may not be comfortable lifting your arm up against gravity. And so for instance, if you have a rotator cuff tear, and it’s painful to reach up, out this way, because you’re compressing the ball into the socket on this exercise, it actually improves the mechanics, and then trains your shoulder blade muscles in moving your shoulder blades in the direction that they should move.

Whenever you’re raising your arm up is your third up in your rotator cuff tear, you should be doing this very frequently do 30 to 60 reps every hour. The third exercise you should be doing to make sure that you can avoid rotator cuff repair surgery is using a pulley like this to get your arm to go up higher overhead.

But you’ve got to shrug that’s a key factor that isn’t commonly taught when using pulley ropes like this for shoulder improvements. But you’ve got to shrug that’s a common factor that isn’t taught in health care places when using a shoulder pulley like this to improve your shoulder mobility after a rotator cuff tear.

So the way this works is you get this part of the strap and you’re going to put it over your door and then close your door on it so that this part stays on the other end, and it’s stuck, then you pull up a chair in front of your door. And I’ll show you the movement to do so let me set this up real quick.

Make sure your door is secure, and that nobody’s going to come in, you might lock in for safety. And then you just grab the whole of the whole of the handles right here. And usually when using this in a physical therapy clinic, for instance, a physio clinic, people just go up and down without any direction on how to do this specifically, they just say move it up and down.

They’ll say help you’re involved side. So like let’s say it’s my shoulder on the left here that’s got the rotator cuff tear, they’ll say help your left side with your right side pull down on the right side to get your left side to go higher. And that’s the extent of the instruction that they give. What I want you to do to make sure that you get full range of motion as fast as possible and protect your rotator cuff tear and get it to heal is you’ve got to shrug.

So whenever your hand comes up to about I level from my left hand right here, you need to begin to shrug your shoulder up on that side and hold the shrug as you come up. And I’d be willing to bet money if you’re doing this right now, you’re going to get like an extra 10, maybe even 20 or 30 degrees, instantaneously because the shrug is what’s missing in your motion.

So when you come up right here, shrug and avoid tipping your head over try to keep your head nice and straight when you shrug. And then as you come up, shrug and go as high as you comfortably can and then come back down no pain. Don’t let go of your shrug either until your hand is back to about eye level then like go with a shrug and train yourself to lift your arm.

This way, every single time I level shrug, hold the shrug as you come up as high as you comfortably can then come down back to eye level then relax the shrug, you need to be doing this for five to 10 minutes or longer.

If you can, multiple times a day I would look to accumulate 20 to 30 minutes a day of doing this training your muscles just shrug like this, every time that your arm goes up is critical for taking the next steps in preventing a rotator cuff tear again in the future. The fourth exercise is a shrug progression. So you need a wall.

Hopefully you have one of those at home. And what you’re going to do is get your forearms onto the wall right here. Just like this, and your elbow should be about shoulder height. It doesn’t have to be exact. Once you’re on the wall, you’re not going to lean on the wall, you’re just kind of touching arms in the wall, then you’ve got to shrug all the way up.

It looks like this shrug up you heard that my collarbone popped. And that’s actually what I’m hoping for and you that you unlock some joint and it pops because that’s missing motion that you had. Then once you shrug up, hold it for 10 seconds. And you should feel like you’re shaking. Key things here. Make sure that your chin stays a little bit tucked. So when you shrug up your heads going to want to show forward but keep the chin down a bit.

Hold it there for 10 seconds. And after 10 seconds you can relax. If you need to bring your arms down, that’s fine. Just go again, do it 10 times in a row. taking breaks as needed. After 10 seconds come down. And what you need to begin to do after a couple of reps is go higher. See if you can get your shoulders all the way up to your ears.

Because the problem here that most people run into is they shrug, and I’ll come up behind them and shove their shoulders up. And they’re only struggling halfway, I get it, I shove them up and then they, they go up an extra few degrees, and then their shoulder muscles are shrugging muscles up here, work very intensely. That right there is the missing strength.

When you get your shoulders all the way up, get somebody to come up behind you and shrug your shoulders up. That strength right there is the key ingredient to fixing a rotator cuff tear for the long term.

Once you get good at holding it up for 10 seconds, right here, then you can begin to move your arms up the wall and eventually extend your elbows still touching the wall and then eventually off the wall shrugging like that, still holding for 10 seconds, and repeating 10 times and you would do this several times a day, I would do this hourly.

If you can progress to here, you’re done with the rotation exercise because your shoulders Calm down, you’re getting your mobility back because you use the pulley. Now you need to strengthen your shrugging muscles up the wall, then get off the wall, then you’re going to be ready for the next steps.

The fifth exercise is an overhead press. Once you’ve gotten good at those shrugs, your pulley exercise has gotten you to shrug Well, whenever you raise your arm up, now you’re ready to lift weights up overhead. And let me just take a quick detour right now. Because you might be thinking right now if your doctor told you this, I shouldn’t be lifting up anything overhead.

If I have a rotator cuff tear, my doctor said don’t pick up anything of weight over my head. This is usually great advice at the beginning of rotator cuff tear when it’s very flared up. Because chances are that you’re going to make it worse if you do pick up something heavy when it’s already agitated.

If it’s a fresh injury, something like that you don’t want to aggravate it more. But once you’ve progressed yourself through these exercises, like I’ve shown you, then there comes a time when you do need to start picking up weights overhead. And you’ve set the foundation properly. If you can shrug well, and you’re struggling muscles are working very good for you.

So at that point, you want to get a small weight, I’ve got a five pound weight, you might start with a one pound or, or a kilogram or a few kilograms, a few pounds, I’ve got five here and you’re just going to hold the weight like so shrug and hold it for 10 seconds, count 10 seconds, make sure your chin is down, don’t let your head go forward or jump out like that, after 10 seconds, you can come down and repeat this 10 times holding for 10 seconds.

Once you’ve practiced this with about 10 pounds or so here’s a 10 pound plate and doesn’t have to be this shape away. By the way you can use a dumbbell, you can use a kettlebell, you can use a sack of cans of water bottles of that produce whatever you want to use, that equates to about this much weight. And you’re going to strengthen this muscle by holding it up that way.

So it doesn’t matter the shape of the weight, the kind of weight, just use some weight, come up, hold it right there. 10 seconds. Now the only way that I don’t recommend doing with this is bands resistance bands like the rubber bands, because it changes amounts of tension, the more you tension the band, the more intense it gets.

So and plus it gives you a wobbly feel, you can control it as good as you can control this. And this is a much normal thing to carry, then bands, you don’t really move in life with bands attached to you and you’re fighting this awkward resistance. So I’m not a fan of doing bands for that purpose. Now, there’s great reasons to use bands.

But right now, you should avoid them to make sure that you’re doing this overhead press properly. Once you get good at holding this up for 10 seconds. And you can do multiple sets, you can maybe even get up to like 50 6070, maybe even 100 reps per day in sets of say 10 Then it’s time to start to press in reps.

So you might go to a heavier weight or start with your 10 pound weight. And you’re going to do a little baby squat and then shoot it up. That little squat helps you to boost the weight up and it assists your rotator cuff, you actually don’t want to be doing what we call a strict press where you don’t use your legs at all or you’re sitting to take out your legs.

And then you just pick up real slowly because that forces a lot of tension on your rotator cuff tendons. You need to use your legs to get a little boost to push that weight up. And then at this point, you should be excellent at using your upper traps.

So make sure that you’re shrugging every time you come up for that quick moment that the weight is at its peak. Okay, I wish you the very best in getting your rotator cuff tear to heal naturally without surgery.

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