Top 5 Shoulder Impingement Exercises To Help Get Healthy Again

Shoulder impingement can heal very quickly once he started doing the right exercises. In this video, I’m going to show you the top five shoulder impingement exercises to help get healthy again, these exercises are simple, straightforward, and they don’t require any equipment except for a small weight, which you can use a water bottle to replace the weight. And that would work for you. And I’ve got a bonus exercise at the end, that does require a piece of equipment.

That’s why I didn’t include it in the top five. But that bonus exercise can really make your shoulder impingement exercise routine, very comprehensive, so that you can make sure to take care of it once and for all as fast as possible.

But adding in that bonus exercise really makes your shoulder impingement exercise routine comprehensive, so that you can make sure you’re doing everything possible to allow your body to heal itself as fast as you can.

Now these exercises are organized in progression from easiest to most difficult. So the first couple of exercises I’m going to show you here are going to be the easiest ones that you should be doing. If you’re particularly flaring up right now, in other words, if you’re in a lot of pain, and you’re having a lot of trouble with your shoulder right now, these are the ones that you should start with and do a lot of them, then as your shoulder pain calms down, you’re going to do slightly harder exercises, but a little bit less of those.

And then as your shoulder pain goes away, you got to work on a few things to prevent this shoulder impingement problem from coming back over and over again. So for the first exercise, you’re going to do shoulder rotation. And I’ll show you exactly what this looks like. But I always think of this exercise as the Chinese golden kitty exercise.

You know, when you go into certain restaurants, there’s a little statue, a little figurine of a golden kitty. And these are usually Chinese food restaurants or other Asian dining. And I love these little golden kitties, because they remind me so much of this exercise, you can either lie down somewhere with a pillow, and instead of putting it into your head, you’re going to put it under the arm of the affected side.

So it’s going to be like this and you’re trying to get your arm to be about 90 degrees relative to your body, it doesn’t have to be exact, you’re just trying to get in the area. And if it hurts to go up that high, then it’s okay to come down a bit and work at this angle.

Once you’re at the right position that’s comfortable for you, then what you’re going to do is let your arm slowly drop in this direction, and only go as much as comfortable without it hurting, then go the other way, only as much as it’s comfortable without any pain.

And take your time, you’re going to go up and down with your arm just like the little golden kitten. And you’re going to do this for three to five minutes. Take your time. The point here is not to get a lot of repetitions, it’s not going to tire you out very much either. The point is just to begin to teach your rotator cuff muscles, how to act like stabilizers.

Again, not to have this exercise be effective on you, it needs to be done kind of frequently, you need to be doing it about every one to two hours. And now I know that’s not practical for some situations, like if you work at a job where you can’t lie down somewhere and take a few minutes out of your day to do this.

Do your best to make this fit in your schedule, you might do this plenty in the morning before you go to work. And then again, after you get off of work, get back to doing it. And during the day, just do your best. There’s other exercises that I’m going to be covering with you today that you can do at work, or in the middle of the day.

Take your time. And remember, don’t push into any pain or discomfort. If it does hurt you to go say this far, then what you’re going to be doing is only going that far in the future, don’t push into the zones that are uncomfortable for you.

And what you’ll probably find is as you keep doing this, you know two, three minutes in, you can go a little bit further and it doesn’t bother you as much because now your rotator cuff muscles are learning how to hold the ball against the socket better.

So just to recap, for this one, you’re going to do three to five minutes worth about every one to two hours as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with your day. The goal with this is to ideally get in about 10 rounds of this, but you have to spread it out, you can’t do them all together because you need to wake up those muscles on a continual basis throughout the day.

For the second exercise, I call this an angry cat exercise kind of going along the theme with cats and kittens. But the reason for the name is because you’re going to be arching your back like an angry cat does whenever they’re bothered or upset. So you’re going to have to get on your hands and knees for this one. And then you’re going to be either on your fists or on your flat hands.

It doesn’t matter how you want to be just whatever is comfortable for you. I like this because my wrists like it better. Then with your back, you’re going to push up this way as much as you can. Now what that does, when you push your back away from the surface that you’re on, you’re away from your arms.

It makes the ball and socket joint align better in your shoulder, because in that impingement syndrome in your shoulder, it’s not aligned very well but when you push your shoulder blades forward the sockets there they’re usually facing out sideways, the socket side of the joints.

Now you make them face forward and then when you put a little bit of body weight through them, it makes the ball part of that don’t wait, go up into the socket, which is helpful for alleviating shoulder impingement syndrome, that we’re going to hold there. And then I’ll show you some movements to do with this exercise.

So you’re going to get in position here, hands right into your shoulders, comfortable with your knees, and hips and legs, and then push your back up there and hold it for about 10 seconds to get an idea for how far up you can go. And you want to practice pushing your back up as high as you possibly can like an angry cat as long as it’s not hurting you.

If it does hurt, you then find a comfortable zone that you can move in that direction, pushing your backup, but without allowing your shoulder to bother you more. If it doesn’t bother you at all to do this to go up which most people that have shoulder impingement syndrome, it doesn’t bother them, it’ll only bother them if they have a really aggravated rotator cuff tear.

But if you’re just dealing with shoulder impingement, you should be okay. Hold that position right there and then sit back like a cat sitting on his haunches, like you’re sitting down on your legs, but still pushing your arms forward and into the table, then come back up over. And then once you get to here, you can relax slowly. And I want you to repeat that 20 to 30 times.

Now what this does is it’s of course, helping the ball and socket joint alignment, it’s teaching your rotator cuff muscles to behave normally again. And then it’s also helping you work your shoulder blades, the muscles around your shoulder blades, so that they can stabilize properly the way they should to, you’re just going to go back and forth 20 to 30 times.

People often love this exercise. And they’ll do it more than that. And that’s totally fine. It’s also not a super tiring exercise. So if you want to do 50, or 100 reps, as long as it’s not hurting you, that’s fine, you can do that, too.

Now, the only thing with this exercise before you start doing 50 to 100 reps is like the rotation exercise, you need to be doing this one about every one to two hours to get the most benefit out of it because it wakes up all the shoulder stabilizing muscles, it gets the ball to sit in the socket as best as possible.

So you need to be doing it frequently throughout the day in order to get the best benefit. Those two exercises are the ones that you should be doing if you’re dealing with a very irritated shoulder problem. But if it’s coming down and you can tolerate a bit more than these next two exercises are where you should be spending more time.

The third exercise I call windshield wipers and here’s why you’re going to move in your arms like windshield wipers. But it’s going to challenge your shoulders a bit more your rotator cuff. So let me walk you through it you need to lie down on the floor or on the bed. If you’re on the floor, I recommend you put pillows under your elbows or something soft something cushiony because this can irritate the skin and your elbows if you do it on a hard surface.

And even if it is irritating your elbows anyway, stop doing it to the point that it’s irritating anything, it’s you shouldn’t be doing anything that’s hurting. So you’re going to lie down, face down. And then you have to do a plank.

Now a plank, people think of getting up on your toes, like everything from your elbows to your toes being up kind of similar to the pushup position, but I just want you to go to your knees or even your hips is fine.

So if you just push up like that, or on your knees like that, that’s adequate to get the effect we need on the shoulder for the impingement syndrome that you’re going to be fixing. So elbows need to be right under the shoulder, what you don’t want to do is have your elbows tucked in to your elbows closer to your chest and stomach.

And it’s not under your shoulder because it’s going to put some bad forces on your shoulder joint. So right under your shoulders, the best place to be, then you’re going to push your back up just like on that angry cat exercise that we just did.

And while you’re holding up, I’m shaking already, just holding right here, you’re going to start moving those arms in like this, they’ll cross each other, and then out. And it doesn’t matter if they cross the same way or different. But go 10 times as 3,4, 5.

And I’m trying to keep my backup in the air as much as possible eight 910. And then after that you can relax. Obviously, this is a bit harder than the last two exercises. But now you’re really strengthening your rotator cuff muscles as well as the shoulder blade muscles can because you’re having to force your back up in that position. And it helps with the alignment so much to improve your shoulder impingement syndrome.

So we do it again here, backup as high as possible, and start crossing the arms. That’s 1234 Keep your backup because you’re going to have a tendency to drop your back like this, but you have to make sure you continually push that backup.

Think that was 789 10 who that feeling you get when it burns in make that noise who that’s what you’re kind of looking for because then you know you’re tired out your muscles adequately and if you can go a little bit beyond that, even better, as long Unless you’re not running into any pain, so for this exercise, it’s ideal if you can do 20 to 30 reps at a time.

So I just did 20. Right now, the two sets of 10. So you might do two to three sets in one time at one time. And then you would need to do this five to 10 times per day to get that ball to sit in the socket and get the muscles around the joint to activate properly so that they stay centered as best as possible without aggravating the shoulder joint more.

And if you’re able to do this exercise well, and you don’t feel like it’s aggravating anything, then you can focus on this one and the next one, and you don’t have to do the first two as much, because they’re probably not going to be as impactful for you as this windshield wiper was. And the next exercise the shoulder shrug. So exercise number four, we’re going to be doing a shrug against a wall, let’s go over to the wall.

This shrug exercise is really important, because in shoulder impingement syndrome, if you think about the socket side of the joint and the ball, you’re trying to improve the shrugging muscles, because that moves the socket upwards, so that when you raise your arm, that’s when people usually get pain towards the end of that motion, you’re getting the socket to move adequately, up and out of the way of the ball, and the alignment is maintained, so that you’re not pinching stuff inside your shoulder.

So here’s what it looks like you’re going to use a wall, put your forearms against the wall, and you’re just barely, you’re not really resting on the wall very much, you’re more so just kind of touching them.

But you don’t want to lean on the wall a whole lot, then in that position, you have to maintain a slight double chin, I’m going to turn it around, because you need to see this here, you have to make a double chin, but a slight one. So about a 50, maybe even 25% intensity, double chin.

So this is 100, I’m going about 50%, maybe even a little bit lighter. But the trick is, when you do the shrug motion, when your shoulders come up like that, your head is going to want to on tuck, it’s not going to stay tucked in like this, it’s going to want to go that way. And you have to maintain the position, hold it.

And don’t let it move because when you shrug, you’re going to want to do that right there, chin comes out, your head kind of wants to look up, but you have to keep your head slightly down so that your chins in position when you come up don’t want to talk more like you’re tipping your head down more, you just need to keep the position you start with.

So here it is right here, you’re going to hold your arms up on the wall parallel to each other, I like to put my pinkies in the wall, thumbs out, there’s no magic about that. That’s just what I do. Then tuck your chin about 25 to 50%. Then shrug up and hold it there for 10 seconds. And I don’t know if you can tell but I am shaking right here.

Because I feel my upper traps, my upper trap muscles are working. The ones that are right in here, they go up to the base of the skull down the neck and out here to the corners of the shoulders on both sides, of course. And that’s what you want to feel you want to feel those muscles working, hold it up there for 10 seconds, a going to do 10 reps, keeping your chin in position. And as you do these reps, what you should feel is the of course these muscles up here are working.

But those double chin muscles are the ones that that tighten up, when you bring your chin down, they will start to also fatigue and tire out on a smaller intensity. And that’s okay, you want that to happen. Because those muscles are called the deep neck flexor muscles, they actually give you a lot of stability in your neck.

And they help to free up the nerve space that any disc herniations you might be dealing with as well, that could be setting up weakness into the muscles out in the shoulder, you want those nerves to have plenty of space, so that the nerve supply to the muscles is as close to 100% as possible.

So for this exercise, you’re going to do 10 reps at one time with breaks as needed in between and hold each rep for 10 seconds, you should be coming up and slowly counting to 10. Take a rest break. Some people need a second some people need 10 seconds, whatever you want, then do it again.

And what you’re trying to do here is build up your tolerance to doing these shrugs because if right now all you can do is like five seconds because you might only hold five seconds and a few reps, that’s okay.

But eventually you need to work towards the goal of doing 10 second holds 10 times. And if you want to make it slightly harder, here’s what you would do. Instead of starting here with your elbows about parallel to your shoulders, you’re going to raise your arms up in shrug from there, same position with your head, everything else is the same.

It’s just that your arms are higher up and eventually you can lock out your elbows and shrug like that with just your hands touching the wall. Once your arms are all the way up and you you’re doing consistently 10 second holds there and you’re able to do 10 reps and you’re doing this exercise five to 10 times per day so you’re getting in a total of 50 to 100 reps spread out throughout the day.

Then you’re ready for Exercise number five which is going to be weightlifting overhead. So this is where you’re going to need a small weight this is two and a half pounds. If you feel like you can do more than this like a five or even 10 pounds and you’re safe your shoulder feels fine doing it you know Feeling the after effects afterwards, then that’s okay.

But I would recommend you start with a very lightweight like this. And if you don’t have a wait like this, go grab a water bottle, even a big water bottle like I’ve got this metal one, there’s some ways, well, I don’t know exactly how much this weighs. But it’s more than this two and a half pounder, so it’s probably closer to five pounds.

And you could use that to pick it up over your head and replace a weight. And here’s what you’re going to do with this exercise. So here’s Exercise number five, you’re going to grab the weight with two hands, it is possible for you to hold two weights it one in each hand like this, if that’s what you have at home, that’s fine, or two water bottles, it hold the weights in your hands, and then you’re going to reach up and as you come up once the weight passes about face level right here, you have to shrug just like we did in the wall on exercise number four.

So wait, come straight here. And then you need to shrug. Hold your chin and position and come up all the way struggling and hold it there for 10 seconds. After 10 seconds, keep the shrug until the weight gets to about face level again, then

 

relax. So now you’re going to do 10 second holds holding away no wall anymore. And when that weight comes up to about face level, you need to shrug all the way, hold it up on the way down. After 10 seconds, the whole the shrug until the weight gets to about face level and then relax the shrug. Now this is teaching you to properly move your arms up and down.

Because when you start to reach up, what should happen with your shoulder blade is you should begin to shrug gradually. And then by the time you get all the way up overhead, your shoulder blade should be shrugged up 100%. So that’s you need to be practicing with a small weight. And if you’re somebody who likes to lift weights up overhead, especially heavier weights, that’s okay, it’s actually a good thing for you to do that.

As long as you’re doing it the way that I’m telling you where you’re shrugging properly and holding your neck in position, it’s not uncommon that people will pick up weights overhead and their head does this. I have even seen trainers and fitness instructors, coaches, those types of people, and unknowingly

Of course, instruct people to allow their head to go forward, especially with like barbell with the long bar with those types of exercises the whole the weight out here, and then they’re telling you to move their head forward in order to accomplish the lift properly. But that’s actually pinching the nerves slightly and irritating the discs.

And over time, you can get a disc herniation and a pinched nerve, which can of course affect the shoulder and set you up for shoulder impingement problems. And not to mention, of course, the slightly more obvious problem is that when your arms up here, you’re stacking all the bones properly, the humerus the ball is stacking on top of the socket.

And if your arm is more at an angle, you’re not stacking and you’re increasing the lever arm. So we’re getting a little sciency here, a little physical therapy talk. But when the way that the the simple idea here is that when the weights up overhead, it’s easier to hold up than if the weights at an angle it feels heavier and it is more stress on your shoulder.

So going straight up overhead, like I just showed you like that is the right way to lift weights overhead. And that’s how you need to be doing it to be safe and protect yourself from more shoulder impingement in the future. Now this weightlifting exercise is definitely for when you’re feeling fantastic, hardly ever having any shoulder pain, and now you’re looking to prevent it.

If you’re in that zone, then it’s not as necessary for you to do the last four exercises. At this point you might need to be getting into the gym to do more weightlifting type exercises and practicing good form with a full shrug, and your chin slightly tucked like I showed you. Now let me show you that bonus exercise, you’re going to need a place to hang to do this.

And here’s the bonus Exercise number six, you’re going to need a pull up bar or something sturdy that you can hang from. And it doesn’t have to be this a frame like this one, a standalone pull up station, you can use one of those over the door inside the door ones those are not going to be as stable. And I would not trust those with your full body weight or even partial body weight if you’re a bigger person. So just be careful and make sure you’re being safe whenever you do this.

Now the idea with this is really simple. When you pull your body when you stretch your body in a hanging position and your hands up there and it’s pulling down like that you are opening up. Let me show you the skeleton, your shoulder joint and stretching out the bones. So when you’re reaching up like that you’re pushing the ball up into this part of the shoulder blade, this this overhanging bone.

And as long as you’re not irritated and it doesn’t hurt to do this, it’s actually a safe thing to do so that you can remold reshape your shoulder joint so that it can tolerate doing more hanging stuff more other exercises, weightlifting and there’s a whole book written on this. I’m not just making this stuff up. But I agree that it works on a percent.

This is not well researched at all. I have to warn you in that this is very new thinking very advanced thinking, but I’ve got a video where I interviewed an orthopedic surgeon Urgent Dr. John curse. That’s where I credit this idea. And that that video interview is linked in the description below in case you want to learn more details about where I’m getting this hanging concept from.

But here’s how it works, you’re just going to find a place to hang, grab, you can grab overhand or underhand, it doesn’t matter. And then let your body weight sink down. And right now I’m getting about 50% here, so my feet are touching the ground, not all my body weight is going through my hands. So I can tolerate hanging here longer than if I had my whole body weight hanging.

What you want to do is hang here for 10 to 30 seconds, and let your shoulder stretch out, let yourself relax, don’t try to hold it up like this, you want to let yourself just dangle. And after 10 to 30 seconds, you can come on up, take a little rest break. And then repeat this for a 10 minute time span.

The reason for that is because that’s enough input into the ball and socket joint to get it to respond to open up and start to reshape itself. This reshaping is important in my opinion, in order to get the that overhanging bone on the socket side to move out of the way so that you’re avoiding surgery later on, of course, avoiding a rotator cuff tendon tear.

Now it’s critically important in my opinion, that you don’t do this, if you’re in pain, you shouldn’t grit through pain with this, and you find a happy medium. So if you go hang on here, even at 50% of your body weight and it hurts, see if you can back off a bit and only hang with 10 or 20% of your body weight, or maybe even shift over to one side or the other and see if that’s better for you.

And if you just can’t do it even at that low percentage, then you need to be working on the other exercises for a time and then come back to this and once you feel like you’re better able to tolerate it. And you would only need to do this one or two times a day because it’s going to tire out your grip and it’s going to stretch you out pretty good.

I know people that do it more often than that, and that’s fine as long as you feel like you can comfortably tolerate that some people eventually progressing to doing pull ups. It’s not 100% needed in order to fix a shoulder impingement problem. But if you wanted to do it for your own fitness or your own goals, I think it’s fine and it’s a good thing.

I hope this helps you with your shoulder impingement problem. Please share this video with somebody you think needs to hear this and don’t forget to give us a thumbs up if you thought this was helpful please subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don’t miss out on any of our helpful videos. No Forget down in the description below are links to other playlists for other shoulder problems that you might need help with. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye