Shoulder Symmetry Issue

[OatmealFitness]

I have looked around the forum and have found some great information on shoulder injury prevention and care, but have not been able to find anything on my personal situation. This being my right shoulder I guess is "rolled" forward compared to my left. I can consciously adjust my shoulder position back to where I think it should be, but my natural posture places it forward and lower than my left shoulder. Even when I correct my posture, the symmetry is off between my left and right shoulder in the anterior and lateral delt. I believe that my posterior delts do not have as nearly drastic of a difference, but of course I have a hard time seeing that. My left side seems do have developed fine, I wish I could just mirror it to my right. I have noticed that my left pec is slightly fuller and the separation between my left pec and delt is more pronounced than on my rights side. Strength on both sides is even. I believe that the various causes of this range from my athletic activity playing baseball where I pitched for a decade throughout my childhood and high school, rugby where I tackled predominately with my right shoulder and played a fair amount of time at loose-head prop (only using your right shoulder in scrums) and I had a minor rotator cuff injury while wrestling in high school. However, I have to admit I am sure that much of the problem lands squarely on myself for using poor exercise habits/form. I believe that my form is much improved over my old violent lifting motions. The one thing that I have noticed is that while flat benching, when I begin to die out on my last rep my right elbow will often pop in toward my body. I do not lose control and this actually helps. I realize that this is not a good thing, but I have no idea how to control or change this habit. My shoulder muscles seem to try and dominate all my upper body exercises. I have not even done any anterior or lateral delt isolation exercises in about two years, because I have larger shoulder muscles and have not felt the need. Not sure if that was foolish or? But the one good thing is that I do not ever have any real pain in my shoulders. I do notice that I have some discomfort while doing some chest isolation exercises such as using the fly machine and occasionally at other times, but nothing that is alarming. My primary concern at the moment is injury prevention and correcting this err in posture for aesthetics. I am curious what is my best route to treating this problem? Visiting a chiropractor or consulting my primary physician and seeking out help from a specialist? Is something like this correctable? And if pictures would be helpful I could take a couple. Any information, links or details from personal experience would be greatly appreciated.

Also note that I am planning on getting the Inside-Out DVD. I have heard so many good things about it.

[Cloud9Fitness]

This message is from Dr. Scott. Being a former winger for the St. Louis Bombers, he wanted to personally address a fellow rugger.

I’m glad you are not having pain, but more pain symptoms may have been helpful for further pinpointing possible issues. Please take my ideas with a grain of salt as you don’t have specific pain issues, and I cannot do an exam.

I suspect a combination of posterior capsule contraction, pec minor tightness, and relative thoracohumeral muscle dominance. A history of throwing sports, bench press, and minor rotator cuff injuries may have caused your joint capsule to contract in response to repeated stress. With dominant pecs and lats (relative to the upper trap, lower trap, and rhomboid) a contracted posterior capsule can depress and protract the scapula (down and forward shoulder). Sitting at a desk on a computer can cause a physiologic shortening of the pec minor. This can lead to an anterior shoulder as well as a tilted scapula.

To test for these things your physician (or an athletic or personal trainer) can assess the internal rotation of your shoulder. A contracted posterior capsule will either have 20 degrees less internal rotation or 10 degrees less total rotation compared to your left arm. Relatively weak traps (and serratus anterior) can be tested with a comparison of your scapular upward rotation when you raise your hand, and a scapular muscle assistance test. A short pec minor can be assessed by having someone look at your back to see if the inferior angle of the scapula is visible a rest, or by lying you on your back to see if your right shoulder is off the mat relative to the left shoulder.

On top of a variety of scapular, rotator cuff, and kinetic chain exercises that you can find in this forum and other resources, you may want to try the ‘sleeper stretch’ and a pec minor stretch. The ‘sleeper’ is when you lie on your right side with your elbow at 90 degrees and internally rotate your arm (push your palm towards the ground) with your left hand. Try to attain equal motion in both shoulders. 135 degrees of total motion is normal. The pec minor stretch requires a friend. While you lie on your back, your partner simply cups your AC joints and gentle presses towards the ground.

[OatmealFitness]

Thank you for the info. To be honest I have to kind of decipher it, I am no anatomy expert at the moment. After some more reading on this topic and further self inspection, my own uneducated opinion feels that the major problem lies with my scapula position or posture on my right side. Focusing on keeping it back/down and tight corrects the position of my shoulder. I also examined my bench form much closer and noticed that I seem to pinch my right shoulder up toward my neck. So would focusing on my pressing exercise form, along with increasing my pull to push exercise ratio be a good way to combat this (trying to tighten my back pretty much). As well as incorporating some various scapular exercises and in general focusing on keeping my posture/scapula down and tight be helpful? I may be way off, but does look like a good start? If anyone could suggest some back exercises that may help, that would be great. One that I am planning to use is face pulls.