Shoulder Rehabilitation Exercises Should be Mandatory

Don't leave it until you hurt your shoulder joint, start exercising your shoulders before anything goes wrong. I'm not talking about pushing weights and exercising the major muscles, I'm talking about waking up the rotator cuff muscles before something goes wrong.

I recently damaged one of the muscles in my rotator cuff, ended up with an impinged shoulder and was told that I would need corrective surgery. It was then that I started to research the subject of shoulder injuries and discovered that most of us ignore the rotator cuff until it is too late, me included. It was shoulder rehabilitation exercises that enabled me to get over my rotator cuff injury without surgery.

A large number of shoulder rehabilitation exercises are aimed at strengthening the rotator cuff, an important but often forgotten group of muscles simply because they are so key to shoulder health.

The shoulder is comprised of a shallow ball and socket joint held together by tendons, ligaments, cartiladge and seventeen different muscles. Its complex nature allows us the range of movement that we have but can also leave us prone to injury. The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles which help to keep the shoulder stable by pulling the arm into the socket and help to prevent dislocation.

The rotator cuff can become weak, through injury, wear and tear and neglect and when it does, it leaves us at greater risk of many different shoulder injuries. Just a few quick and easy exercises aimed at the rotator cuff will improve your shoulder health and help to prevent injury in just ten minutes a day.

Even if you have a healthy rotator cuff, building it up will improve your shoulder strength and performance. If you do lift weights you'll discover that a strong rotator cuff can dramatically increase the weights you can lift

Around thirty percent of us will get a rotator cuff problem at some stage. As you get older the risk becomes higher so it is well worth exercising the rotator cuff muscles to prevent a shoulder injury.

Now there is a reasonable chance that if you are already reading this, it is because my advice has come too late. I didn't even know about these muscles until I damaged my shoulder and started looking into the injury. Nearly all of us take our good health for granted until something happens. I am no different.

Okay, if you have managed to hurt your shoulder then shoulder rehabilitation exercises are going to feature somewhere in the solution.

If you have undergone surgery then the advice you get is likely to be to get your shoulder moving as soon as possible to avoid frozen shoulder or loss of movement. Obviously, if you have had surgery then you need to follow your doctor's advice on when to start exercise.

Shoulder exercises don't use great weights or resistance. They tend if anything to use either no weights or very small weights and will involve very gentle exercise to start with that gradually build up in terms of difficulty and frequency until the shoulder has returned to normal. If you feel any disconfort at any time then you need to stop as this is usually an indicator of damage being inflicted.

It is important that before you start to exercise a damaged shoulder let it rest, treat any inflammation and pain with pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs but most important of all is to allow the healing process to take place before you start exercising. If you ignore shoulder pain you are likely to make the situation worse. A pulled or slightly damaged muscle that is ignored can result in a major injury needing surgery and months of rehab.

Better still, look after your shoulders before they let you down and whatever you do keep up the exercises after your shoulder is fixed.