Category: Health and Wellness
Shoulder Tendonitis: Causes, Treatment, and Effective Pain Relief Techniques
What is Tendonitis?
A tendon is a tough, cord-like fiber that connects muscle to bone. Tendonitis happens when a tendon becomes inflamed. This often occurs because a muscle becomes tight and irritated, causing the tendon to be pulled while the muscle is contracted or in spasm. Tendonitis is always related to muscle irritation.
How Does Tendonitis Happen?
Tendonitis can result from a long-term muscle injury or irritation. If muscle pain is ignored, it can develop into tendonitis. This is true for different types of tendonitis, such as rotator cuff, shoulder, or bicep tendonitis.
How to Treat Shoulder Tendonitis
To heal, you need to relax, balance, and loosen the muscles in the shoulder, neck, back, and even the hips. This will help reduce pain. After that, itโs important to strengthen the muscles in ways that donโt cause pain. Strengthening stabilizes the muscles and joints.
There are many methods for doing this. One effective technique is the Nimmo/Receptor Tonus Technique. This trigger point therapy helps loosen, balance, and calm down muscle spasms that are pulling on the tendons and causing tendonitis. The healing process can be sped up significantly when combined with deep tissue red light laser therapy.
On days when you’re not receiving therapy, stretching and icing the area can also help with healing.
Starting Treatment
I usually suggest starting with a chiropractor who specializes in soft tissue work. They can help relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and address any muscle dysfunction.
When irritated muscles become tight, they start pulling on the tendon, irritating it further. Be cautious when working with healthcare professionals. If a physical therapist tells you the injured area is weak and only focuses on strengthening it, you might end up making things worse. Itโs crucial to loosen the muscles and joints first. Strengthening a joint while it’s tight and painful can drive the dysfunction deeper into your system, making recovery harder.
Donโt Ignore Your Pain
The longer you ignore tendonitis, the longer it will stick around. Get your shoulder pain diagnosed and follow a treatment plan.
Best Stretch for Shoulder Tendonitis
For right shoulder tendonitis:
- Place your right hand behind you and try to touch the bottom of your left shoulder blade with your palm facing out.
- Donโt force it; get to a comfortable position where you feel a slight stretch.
- Keep your elbow in by your side, not sticking out.
- Lean back against a wall with your heels and head touching the wall, looking straight ahead.
You may feel pulling in the front of your shoulder or arm. This stretch helps loosen the neck, scapula, shoulder, and arm. If itโs not enough, you can do the same stretch while lying flat on your back.
Final Thoughts
Take care of your shoulder, and donโt let tendonitis linger. Address it early for a quicker recovery.
Have a pain-free day!
Universal shoulder/infraspinatus/subscapularis stretch
Universal Shoulder/Infraspinatus/Subscapularis Stretch
If you could do one stretch to help with shoulder pain, what would it be? One stretch that would help to loosen up tight shoulders. Whether they are tight in the front, sides, back of the shoulder, or armpit (axilla), what would it be?
First, we want to look at how our shoulder is designed.
The arm bone is held into the shoulder socket by the wing bone/ scapula/ shoulder blade. The shoulder blade makes up part of the shoulder socket. The arm bone (humerus) attaches to the shoulder socket. Whenever the arm and hand move, the shoulder blade stabilizes them.
Whenever the hand, arm, and shoulder move, four rotator cuff muscles contract and relax to make those fine motor motions. When you are typing on the computer, your rotator cuff muscles are helping to fine-tune the movements in your hands so that the muscles in your hands can move your fingers accurately.
When we hunch over, whether it is a steering wheel, phone, or keyboard, we are contracting a major rotator cuff muscle and irritating it. It is the subscapularis.
The subscapularis is a big rotator cuff muscle that sits between the shoulder blade and the spine. The muscle raises your shoulders to your ears. It pulls the shoulder blade up and back. When you are reaching for something, it gets stretched out.
It’s like sitting in front of a computer, hunching over and leaning forward to get as close to the computer screen as possible to help you focus. This motion will irritate your entire shoulder, into your upper and lower back, and into your neck.
When the subscapularis goes into spasm, it hikes the shoulder blade up to the ears, making it hard to relax. It might feel like your shoulders are permanently shrugged. Some people will say that they feel like there is a button underneath their shoulder blades. Others will say they feel pulling in the front of their shoulder or behind their shoulder blade and into their neck. The subscapularis will be involved no matter what type of shoulder pain they feel.
The best way to avoid shoulder pain in general and to prevent it from coming back is to watch your posture. Be mindful about how you sit and move. When you sit, try to have something behind the small of your back to maintain the curvature of your lower back.
I like rolling a towel into a cylinder, wrapping rubber bands around it to keep it in place, and putting that in the small of my back. You then lean your upper back against the seat, which will keep your back in a good position and in good posture. Bonus if you can have something to rest your head back onto.
When you lean back against the seat, with the lumbar roll behind the small of your back, it pulls your shoulder blades down your back, relaxing the subscapularis. It also maintains the lumbar curve, which helps to keep your lower back, hips, and legs in good posture.
You can also try to squeeze your shoulder blades together. That will bring them down your back and get them in a good position. The best stretch for this area is a yoga stretch.
If your right shoulder is painful, place your right hand behind your back, palm out. Try to reach the bottom of the left shoulder blade. Even if you canโt touch the bottom of the left shoulder blade, that is fine. Get your right hand as high up the left side of your back as possible without bouncing or pushing. Make sure to tuck your right elbow into your side.
Now, lean back against a wall. Touch your heels against the wall. Touch your head against the wall. Look straight ahead.
You might feel that stretch going into your neck, upper back, back of the shoulder, front of the shoulder, and even down into the arm.
This stretch will stretch all of those areas out. If I could recommend one universal shoulder stretch that would affect most shoulder issues, Iโd recommend this one. I do it daily to manage my shoulder pain.
Iโd recommend the same for you.
I hope that you have a pain-free day.
Is Your Levator Scapula To Blame?
Levator Scapula Pain Relief
Do you have shoulder pain?
Were you told that it might be coming from your levator scapula?
Do you know what your levator scapula is?
It can commonly cause neck, upper back, and shoulder pain.
The levator scapula is the muscle you are trying to reach and rub when you put your hand behind your
back, from the top, and the top of your shoulder blade. It is the area between the top of the
shoulder blade and the spine.
The levator scapula is a muscle that attaches the top medial portion of the shoulder blade to the neck.
It raises your shoulder blades. This muscle helps you to shrug.
If you keep your shoulders raised high and up by your ears, you can cause your levator scapula to
spasm. Once your levator scapula goes into spasm, it will be painful to lower your shoulders and
do many other motions with your shoulders.
The primary irritant for our shoulders these days are computer work, driving, and looking down at your
phone.
These actions cause us to hunch our shoulders.
When we hunch our shoulders while looking down, our shoulder blades come up to our ears. This will
cause our shoulders, upper back, and neck to all tighten up.
Throw some stress on top, causing us to clench our teeth or clench in other areas, and this motion can
easily cause a flare of the levator scapula and the surrounding areas.
The subscapularis is one of the main muscles that move our shoulders up to our ears.
You’ll recognize the muscle if youโve read any of my other blogs.
It is the big rotator cuff muscle between your shoulder blade and your spine.
This muscle causes you to shrug your shoulders.
When you are sitting in front of a computer for hours, getting stressed out, these muscles will tighten up.
When driving for long distances, even over 30 minutes, hunching over the steering wheel and
having a death grip on the steering wheel can cause these muscles to spasm.
When you are sitting at home, scrolling on your phone, and looking down at it, then your shoulder
blades will be coming up your back and tightening up.
All of these motions can cause your levator scapula to go into spasm.
How do you calm down the levator scapula?
This involves stretching the hips into the upper back, shoulders, and even the neck.
On my website, https://cohentriggerpoint.com/courses/, youโll find stretches and exercises for all
these areas. I recommend starting at level 1. Under the blog section of my website, you can find videos
explaining and demonstrating how to trigger point and foam roll your achy and painful muscles at home
and calm down these inflamed and irritated muscles.
Please keep in mind that a tight muscle will be a weak muscle. Even if the muscle feels weak, you want
Start by stretching it and loosening it up before you try to strengthen it.
You must work out the entire neck, upper back, and shoulder complex.
Trigger-point therapy is one of the best ways to get this worked out.
Trigger point therapy can treat all of the affected shoulder, upper back and neck, and even jaw
muscles that can contribute to the pain complex.
An excellent soft tissue chiropractor will be able to work out the trigger points to get the muscles to move the
the way they were designed to move.
Then, a good physical therapist will help reinforce healthy movement patterns and get the shoulder to
move how it was designed. Allowing for positive movement hygiene.
Deep tissue laser therapy is also a great addition to help speed up the healing process.
We can treat and relieve your muscle and joint pain at Cohen Chiropractic Trigger Point Center.
If you are suffering from levator scapula pain, come in and see us.
We will get the pain out.
Have a Pain Free Day.
Levator Scapula Pain Relief
Pain Between The Shoulders
In our modern society, we are all overusing our hands and all the muscles and joints attached to them. That includes the forearms, elbows, upper arms, shoulders, upper back, and neck, and possibly even the jaw. Kids these days call that a kinetic chain. It is how our muscles are attached and work together. You never have one muscle moving separately from everything else.
All of the muscles in our bodies work together. Physical therapists call it regional interdependence. Itโs how one area of our body affects another location and another area. I like the saying that you never have a chance to do a bench press in the real world. We are never just using our pec muscles. We use them with other muscles to move our shoulders and arms. This is a long-winded way of saying that pain between your shoulder blades probably does not come from the rhomboids.
Cell phones are ubiquitous. Everyone has one, and everyone uses them. Whether you are in front of the computer or steering wheel or looking down at your phone, we are all hunching over and looking down way too much. We are doing it so much that it is reshaping our skeletons. Before the pandemic, there was a study that caused people to get upset. The study showed that kids were growing horns on the back of their heads from looking down at their screens so much.
Kids were growing bone spurs on the back of their heads, at the base of the skull, from the pressure of leaning their heads over and looking down for hours on end. We are all hunching over and looking down way too much. This causes our shoulder blades to come up to our ears and tightens the entire kinetic chain from our neck into our hands. Where you get pain along that chain is anyoneโs guess.
Areas of previous injury are much more likely to flare again. If you injured your arm or shoulder, looking down on your lap or doing too much computer work can bring back that old injury. If you have pain between your shoulder blades, the rhomboid will be involved, but other muscles will also contribute to it. The subscapularis is the primary muscle that causes pain between the shoulder blades. The subscapularis is a rotator cuff muscle inside the shoulder blade, between the shoulder blade and ribs underneath it. The primary motion of the subscapularis is shoulder retraction. The muscle pulls your shoulder blades back and down. When you are hunching, your shoulder blades come up to your ears and will pinch and pull on most muscles in the shoulder, upper back, and arm. The subscapularis can pull on the ribs between the shoulder blades and cause pinching pain or prevent rib movement, which can cause pain when breathing in.
How do you prevent this pinching and pulling of the shoulder blades?
-Watch how you sit:
Sit with a small, rounded pillow in the small of your back, and lean backward. You can roll up a towel into a cylinder form and put some tape or rubber bands around it to hold it in place, then set it in the small of your back whenever you are sitting. Lean back so that your upper back is touching the chair. This will keep you in an excellent neutral position by maintaining the curvature of the spine. You should be able to sit comfortably like this for a while. But I wouldnโt sit for longer than an hour without getting up.
-Stretch
A good stretch for this area is to start standing up. You take your painful arm (right side for explanation) and put it behind your back, palm out. Try to touch the bottom of your left shoulder blade with your right fingers, palm still pointing backward. Once you get it as high up your back as you can comfortably (no pushing or jerking), lean back against a wall. It is one of the best stretches for our upper back and shoulders that I have seen. If you try this stretch and try to change how you sit, and you are still having pain between your shoulder blades, then I would seek out a chiropractor who specializes in soft tissue/ muscle injuries. The Nimmo/ receptor Tonus Technique is a significant soft tissue technique for reducing and healing muscle injuries. Deep Tissue Therapy lasers also treat shoulder and rotator cuff muscle injuries well. If you have shoulder pain, come in for a treatment, I can help.
Have a Pain Free Day.
Do You Have Shoulder Pain?
Do you have shoulder pain?
Were you told that your infraspinatus was causing the pain?
Did you even know that you had an infraspinatus?
If you are like most people who are not trained in health care, then chances are, you have no idea of what an infraspinatus is, or what it does, and even more importantly,
Why is it causing this much pain? Your infraspinatus is one of four rotator cuff muscles that we all have. The rotator cuff muscles are four small muscles that hold your arm bone (humerus) in your shoulder joint (the A-C joint). In our modern society, where everyone uses their phones and in front of computers all day, we use our shoulder and rotator cuff muscles way too much and in bad ways. Every minute we are hunching over our phone, keyboard or steering wheel, our shoulders are tightening up.
What is tightening up in our shoulders?
The shoulder and rotator cuff muscles. Muscles can get so tight that they can tear on a microscopic level and go into spasm.
This is what a sprain or, train or muscle pull is. But once you tear a muscle, no matter how small of a tear, you will not just stretch it out.
When muscles go into spasm, they are like steel cables. You arenโt going to stretch them out once and be done with it.
The muscle pull will get wired into your system and become a neurological problem.
How do you treat rotator cuff injuries?
Trigger point therapy is one of the best ways to break muscles out of the neurological patterns of spasms and inflammation that they can fall into.
Good trigger point therapy (Nimmo Receptor Tonus) will help to break up the neurological patterning that perpetuates the pain muscle spasm. It will activate the muscles and get them to loosen up and move normally. This will prime you to do physical therapy and strengthen the injured muscles, further stabilizing the area.
If you try to strengthen injured muscles without releasing and healing them, you will be driving that pain and dysfunction deeper into your system, making it harder to work out.
The saying that I like is that you donโt want to add strength on top of instability. Another tool that I utilize to speed up healing and reduce inflammation is cold laser therapy.
Cold laser therapy is a red light that is produced by a laser. The laser is hot but not hot enough to burn through anything it touches, like a surgical laser.
A cold laser will penetrate the muscle an inch deep and produce healing. It helps to speed up the healing process by strengthening the cell walls of the muscle cells.
It also reduces inflammation.
Red light works well on muscle and joint and arthritis pain. It is one of the few ways to get into stenotic vertebral joints and reduce deep nerve root inflammation.
Trigger point therapy, combined with cold laser therapy, is one of the best ways, and fastest ways to reduce joint pain and muscle pain and speed up healing.
If you have a rotator cuff issue, infraspinatus tendonitis, or injury, come see me for pain relief.
Have a Pain Free Day!
Getting Your Body Ready for Winter
Winter is fast approaching.
Just like we need to get our furnaces ready to handle the impending cold, we need to get ourselves ready for the demands that the cold weather puts on our bodies.
Aging Doesn’t Equal Pain
โIf I had known I was going to live this long then I would have taken better care of myself.โ
โGetting old isnโt for sissies.โ
โThis pain is just due to getting old.โ
These are all common sayings I hear around my office.
I am here to tell you that just because you are aging, doesnโt mean that you have to be in pain. Aging doesnโt equal pain.
The Obesity Paradox
Our overall health is related to how we take care of ourselves rather than related to how big or smallย our waistlines are.
Pain Free Lifestyle exercise and nutrition programs are designed around the principle that it is more important to take care of yourself, be healthy and feel well than it is to lose weight and be thin. The program is designed around the belief that it is more important to be healthy than it is to look healthy. The program is comprised of exercises that are designed to make you feel better, rather than to get skinny. Pain-Free Lifestyle is not a get-thin-quick scheme.
A new, anti-diet book came out that reinforces this approach to exercise and nutrition. It is called โThe Obesity Paradox,โ and it is written by Cardiologist Carl J. Lavie. Lavie, who is a cardiologist at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans, said it very succinctly:ย โLooks can be deceiving.โ
Can Obesity Really Shorten Your Life
A study out of McGill University of Canada concluded that obesity not only shortens oneโs lifespan, but it also shortens the quality of oneโs lifespan as well.
Western society has been suffering from an epidemic of obesity. More than one-third of all Americans, or 78.6 million people, are overweight or obese.
The research out of McGill University proved that being obese will shorten your life expectancy by 8 years. Being obese will also reduce the quality of the last two decades of your life, primarily due to managing the health effects of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and osteoarthritis (the long-term health effects of being obese).
Vitamins & Nutritional Supplements
As anyone who reads my articles can attest, I am a big fan of vitamins and supplements.
I believe that when they are taken as designed, as a supplement to a healthy lifestyle, they have a positive effect on our health.
People get in trouble when they take vitamins and supplements as a replacement for a healthy lifestyle. I have heard the mindset of โI donโt have to exercise or watch what I eat since I take vitamins.โ This couldnโt be farther from the truth.
