[anhospog]

OK, I was one of the thousands of folks who had shoulder pain upon lifting my arms overhead. I couldn't bench without pain, I couldn't do presses, even push ups and pull ups caused pain. I read every article I could find and started doing scapular push ups, face pulls, shrugs, and horizontal rows. The problem was my shoulder pain would wake me up at night after doing any of the above. I went to an orthopod who gave me a cortisone injection in my shoulder and after a week or so the pain improved greatly. So naturally I resumed my total body weight lifting regimen. Unfortunately, I also resumed my bad form, elbows out, bench pressing and resumed doing more bicep curls than needed. After a month or so the pain returned. I tried backing off my workouts and took Celebrex daily. If I avoided all overhead work I could manage a reasonable workout. I returned to the orthopod, had an MRI and stopped my workouts. The MRI showed nothing other than mild osteophytes (bone spurs) in an area consistent with impingement syndrome. He started talking surgery to wack off part of my acromion. He was NOT planning to send me to physical therapy first. I insisted on a PT referral and the PT said all the things I had read about on this site regarding muscle imbalance and lack of scapular mobility. Well, being in the medical field myself I felt I already knew that. I also already had several exercises I wanted to use to correct these imbalances. You know, the face pulls, shrugs, rows I had used last time. As long as I'm doing rehab why not add some iron and get a bit of a workout at the same time. Of course, in my hands they didn't work last time so in desperation I actually followed the PT's advice! He started me with very simple mobility exercises of just pretending to get my scapula(e) to touch each other. He also had me doing "Y's", "T's" and other exercises which did not include any iron. I had read about those on this site also but ruled them out since there was no iron involved. I received a second cortisone injection, rested a week and started doing the PT exercises. After a couple weeks I added scapular push-ups. Hey wait a second, I can now actually FEEL my scapula moving toward each other. Before, the movement was taking place everywhere BUT my scapula. Oh, so that's what mobility means. Previously, I was doing the exercises but with weight present all the movement was occuring in my shoulder joint, and the stresses were being taken up by my triceps, biceps, deltoids, pecs, i.e. everywhere but where needed ( scapular muscles). Let me repeat, until I was able to get the scapula to move, I was unable to begin working those muscles to get them to mobilize and strengthen. I'm 2 months into the PT exercises and I can now do all the face pulls, shrugs and rows I learned on this site. When I do them, I can feel my scapula moving and working. When I do dips my triceps don't fatigue first and I can feel my back muscles working. The system works I just had to start out small and without iron. I seems so simple now. Anyway, thanks for the info on this site. It eventually helped me once I got myself out of the way.