How To Treat Rotator Cuff Pain

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

How To Treat Rotator Cuff Pain At Home

Here’s a training instructional video to prevent and treat shoulder injuries:

The idea to this article came to me naturally when I was doing a light home workout tonight. But first, I want to tell you a story.

I have had a shoulder problem ever since I was fooled into a playful bench press competition with one guy who trained at the same gym. The year was 1995 I believe.

I had planned to do some bench presses that day anyway, but this funny guy somehow got me to forget my usual perfection in form. I had planned to do just fives but he had me do heavy singles to see how much we could lift.

I went up to 145 kilograms. The bar touched my chest, and I hoisted it up with throat sounds you could use for a Jurassic Park movie soundtrack. No problem so far.

But as I got on my feet I found it was difficult to lift my right arm. As though most of the power was gone. A sharp pain went through the shoulder, and I understood that the competition was over, and so was the workout.

I knew I must have a rotator cuff rupture so I also knew I had to find out how to treat rotator cuff injury. The Internet was a baby at that time, so I went to the library.

I knew a lot about injury prevention and rehabilitation so I got proud and didn’t see a physician. Maybe I should have. I had ice treatment immediately and put the shoulder to rest for a week.

Then I did some research and started to train around the injury. I did special exercises, and my favorite was the first dumbbell exercise on this video. It healed the injury almost completely over the years.

But I didn’t recover to be able to bench press again. Dips were impossible too, so I tried something else. I found that I could do incline dumbbell presses very carefully.

Back to tonight. I did my usual rotator cuff exercises. But the shoulder had slowly gotten worse in a few months, and it felt bound, like frozen. I had a portable chinning bar under my bed so I tried that.

I haven’t been hanging from anything for years and now I realize that’s been a mistake. Half of the pain relieved instantly from a few minutes of hanging from the bar. Monkeys are wise creatures.

Let’s grip a doorway bar at home, and add light dumbbell exercises shown in this video.

That is how to treat rotator cuff injury at home!

Ilkka “Flash” Saarisalo