If You Have Reached Forty Maybe You Should Be Thinking About Starting Shoulder Physical Therapy Exercises
Shoulder injuries are not exclusively limited to the over forties, but if you are at risk of a mid-life crisis you are also at a higher than normal risk of injuring your shoulder. Approximately a third of us will suffer a problematic shoulder injury once we get beyond our fortieth birthday. I managed do delay mine until past fifty and had I known then what I know now, I could probably have managed to avoid it altogether.
As we grow older, our posture changes, we do not carry ourselves in the same way at forty as we did in our twenties so it should be no surprise that our shoulders change at the same time. Because of the complexity of the shoulder joint, any change in how we hold ourselves can result in shoulder problems.
The most common shoulder injury is a rotator cuff tear. This is a group of four muscles that help to pull the upper arm bone into the socket of the shoulder, doing two different roles, helping with rotational movement and also helping to stabilise the joint. Although these are relatively small muscles they are very important and problems with the rotator cuff can cause some serious problems.
Weakness and pain when you lift your arm above your shoulder either out to the side or front, weakness in the shoulder and arm, pain when sleeping are just some of the symptoms. Treatment will involve rest along with treatment of any inflammation using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and ice packs.. If the pain persists you may well end up having steroid injections to reduce the inflammation.
Once the swelling and pain are under control you will need to start shoulder physical therapy exercises to strengthen your rotator cuff and avoid future injuries. The annoying thing is that these exercises are the self same exercises that you would have done to train your shoulder and strengthen it to avoid injury in the first place.
Having gone through the inconvenience and pain of a torn rotator cuff and discovered shoulder physical therapy exercises that sorted it out for me, I now do ten minutes of shoulder exercises on a daily basis just to make sure that my shoulders stay fit and healthy. It has also woken me up to the fact that as we get a bit older we do need to make an effort to keep supple as well as fit. Next step Yoga classes
If you found this article useful and would like more information on shoulder physical therapy check out my blog at
http://myrotatorcuffcure.blogspot.com
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com
