HealthWise

The shoulder is the most mobile joint in the body, with a complex muscular structure. Its great mobility makes it more prone to dislocation than other joints in the body, although the most common shoulder problems result from poor habits of use and lack of appropriate exercise.

The shoulder works most efficiently in moving your arm in front of your body and below shoulder height. Your arms move less efficiently when moved behind your body or above shoulder level. For this reason the muscles in the front of the shoulder and in the chest, in most people, tend to be comparatively stronger than the muscles behind the shoulder and upper back. When this difference in front to back strength becomes great enough our shoulders start to slouch forward and our posture suffers, it becomes difficult to open our chests and hold our shoulders back. When this happens our shoulders start to lose their full range of movement, all of a sudden putting on a coat or bowling a ball doesn't feel quite right, injury may be the cause or just simple lack of exercise. When appropriate stretching exercises are performed regularly this is less likely to happen because muscles have a tendency to gradually shorten unless they are stretched. Stretching your shoulder muscles alerts you to developing stiffness too.

It is not uncommon to accidentally tear a muscle by suddenly reaching back to grasp something that used to be within your reach. Because we use our shoulders so much, shoulder injuries are very inconvenient and can be slow to heal.

We should not ignore common early warning signs like not being able to comfortably lie on one shoulder more than another or feel much less freedom of movement from one side to the other. Frozen shoulder is what may eventually result from accumulating stiffness and it is not uncommon in forty and fifty year olds, where reaching upwards at all is not possible. Frozen shoulder may feel like it suddenly happens but usually it builds up over a long time. It is not just unfit couch potatoes who get shoulder problems, some of the most difficult to treat shoulders belong to gym-junkies who only exercise what they can see in the mirror, neglecting the muscles in their upper backs which gives them very poor posture. When we consider the many things we reach out to do it can be very easy to forget to stand straight and pull our shoulders back. Rowing a kayak and deep breathing helps to position our shoulders correctly, using a Swiss ball can help open our chests up and strengthen the postural muscles to straighten the full length of the body. Training ourselves to be more ambidextrous and using backpacks rather than a handbag or a briefcase is shoulder friendly too. Most people are surprised when they discover just how much tension they actually hold in their chest and shoulders. Once this tension is massaged away it may be equally surprising how much easier it feels to breath, and how much anxiety can tighten these same muscles. It is not just physical activity that tightens up your upper body.