How To Keep Your Shoulders Strong!

Shoulder pain can affect the things you love doing big time.

For me a shoulder injury would mean less time doing the things I love like training, surfing or spearfishing.

The good news is a lot of the time shoulder injuries are preventable by doing the right type of strength training, stretches and mobility exercises.

The right type of training will help with functional strength and movement outside of the gym so you can stay active and keep doing the things you love. 

The wrong type or even a lack of training can potentially ruin your shoulders forever!

If you have sore shoulders a good place to start is to stretch the short and tight muscles especially around the shoulders and neck such as the levator scap, upper traps, pec minor and lats as well as mobilise the spine where needed (usually mid back).

This will help to restore stability to the shoulders.

Here are 4 great stretches / mobility exercises to help release tight shoulders and add mobility to the mid back.

You also need to identify and strengthen the weak muscles around the shoulders. Muscles such as the rotator cuffs, serratus anterior, and lower traps are common culprits and can be strengthened by doing the right exercises.

This will also help to add stability to the shoulders.

It’s important to include exercises that help to integrate the shoulders with the rest of the body if you want your training to help you function better outside of the gym.

Machine based training should be limited or avoided completely.

Here’s a great exercise that’ll help strengthen the shoulders and I’ve used it to help rehab a lot of my clients shoulder injuries too.

Once strength and stability has been restored around the shoulder(s) you can then incorporate power or fast tempo exercises into your training program if needed.

Surfing and golf for example are sports that require power so it’s super important to include this type of training into your exercise program.

If you don’t follow this formula your sore shoulder(s) may get some short term strength gains and relief but you’re likely to keep injuring them again and again.

This keeps doctors, surgeons, therapists and drug companies very happy!

It’s a lot easier (and cheaper) to prevent shoulder injuries than trying to fix them.

My “12 Week Surf Strength Program’s” have been designed to help surfers increase their performance in the water with less injuries (including shoulders) but you don’t have to surf to get some great benefits from these programs.

If you want a strong and functional body that looks great then these programs are for you too!