Two Evanston Athletic Trainers Show How To Reduce Shoulder Pain And Increase Shoulder Mobility!

– Hi my name is Dr. Brett and I’m here with Denny Wongosari. We are the athletic trainers at Cornerstone Health. Today we’re gonna be through an upper-body mobility exercise that we like to call wall arm circles. This exercise is going to be pivotal for you if you have a variety of different activities. Whether you are having upper and mid back pain from sleeping, or if you’re having back pain and shoulder pain from working at a computer or a desk for long hours of the day. Or if you like to engage in overhead activities such as tennis, golf, or playing baseball or softball. This is a great exercise for you to utilize, to target the front part of your shoulder joint and also improve the general range of motion in your shoulder.

All right, let’s get started with demonstrating our wall arm circles exercise. For this exercise, Denny will be facing me and we were gonna be utilizing his left shoulder for this example. Now Denny is about a foot and a half away from the wall. The reason we do this is that we like to create roughly a 30-degree angle between your feet and the wall. The reason for this is that by doing so we take gravity out of the equation and we reduce the engagement of your upper trap and neck. That way we don’t cause any impingement or pain in the neck.

So from this position, Denny is in his standing form and he’s gonna lean into the wall. From here he’s gonna bring his inside arm straight out in front of him. At this position, he’s gonna keep this arm pressed into the wall and he’s gonna reach long with his hand. From this position, he’s gonna start the motion of the arm circle with his left arm thumb up behind him.

Once he reaches overhead he’s gonna turn his thumb away as if performing a backstroke and reach long back behind his body. As we continue to go through the exercise, we need to turn the thumb because we open up the front portion of the shoulder joint. And we also get stabilization at the opposite shoulder. So this is a great exercise to work on increasing your range of motion at the shoulder while getting a great stretch.

All right, now that we’ve gone through the wall arm circles exercise together we’ll talk about dosage, or the number of times to complete this exercise.

We at Cornerstone Health recommend that if you want to perform this exercise for general health, you do on average five to six repetitions on each arm in the morning or the evening before you go to bed. If you want to focus more on your overhead activities and other ways to stay active you can perform the same amount of repetitions on each side as a part of your active warmup.

And with this exercise, we are gonna work on reducing any level of pain in your shoulder and improve the level of function with your overhead activity.