People who have pain due to a rotator cuff problem is one of the most common shoulder injuries I see.
Someone might have random pains around the shoulder, or might have hurt it during a lift.
The shoulder is involved in so many lifts. It can be provoked by many lifts. Including ones you don’t necessarily think of, including squats or sometimes even deadlifts.
So, if you have rotator cuff pain, what should you do and when?
Some things you may want to consider:
- If you just hurt your shoulder, doing an evaluation immediately is not always the best option. After an injury, there are a lot of inflammatory processes that occur. As a result, this can make most of the testing give false positives because most movements hurt. Sometimes I might delay getting you in for an evaluation for this reason.
- After a few days, we schedule an evaluation to see what exactly is going on.
- From here, we come up with a customized plan to get you back to hitting PR’s. This would include things to calm down the area, to strengthen, and to get you BEYOND recovery from injury.
So, that’s cool and all.. but when is it an injury and when is it something that will just go away?
Chances are if you have been battling this for more than a few days, for instance, it is time to get it checked out. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything is torn or damaged. However, it would be beneficial to make sure that we are getting you all the tools you need to prevent further injury and to get over this initial injury.
Going to a physical therapist or rehab expert, doesn’t mean that you have to be completely injured. It could be just a small thing that you want to get over quickly, or a full force injury. Either way, consulting your friendly neighborhood rehab expert can be especially important and as a result help you to overcome an injury quicker and get back to PR’s.