Shoulder warm-up

Three Shoulder Warm-up Exercises

Hi everyone, I’d like to introduce a few shoulder warm-up / rehab / preventative exercises that I’ve found useful. As you may know, I have an old neck injury from Aikido that sometimes causes me pain. Doing the 3 exercises below helps reduce the pain and gradually removes it entirely. You can use your BB time for these suggestions.

The first video shows the simplest of the 3 movements, the
“Scap Pull-up”

Hang from a bar with hands slightly wider than the shoulders, as if you were going to do a pull-up. Keeping the arms straight, pull down on the bar using the muscles of the shoulders and upper back. We want the shoulder-blades to move down and back. If you can’t do this while hanging from a bar, use your feet and legs to support some of your weight.

The Scap pull-up has several benefits. Contracting and relaxing the muscles of the shoulders will allow a gradually greater stretch of the muscles around the neck, shoulders and back. We can also train the start of the pull-up, building strength in the bottom position and learning to begin the movement with the back not the arms. You will also be building grip strength 🙂

The second video shows the
“Hanging backward shoulder roll”

I’d like to come up with a better name if anyone can suggest one, perhaps “reverse butter roll” or maybe “reverse-butterfly”, as the shoulders make a circle in the opposite direction to the butterfly pull-up. Here we are not simply raising and lowering the shoulders but trying to make a nice SMOOTH circle.

Start by pushing the chest forward so the body moves in front of the bar (this is the hardest part for me), shrug the shoulders up back and down. The elbows can bend slightly to help the circular movement but don’t let the lower body flop around, keep the feet together. If you can’t do it smoothly then make the movement smaller or keep your feet on the ground.

The last video shows what I’ll call the
“Butterfly-prep”

as this movement is also good for practicing the circular movement of the shoulders in a butterfly pull-up while building strength, mobility and control for the shoulders. We are moving in a circle again but this time the chest moves behind the bar first by spreading the shoulder-blades, then up, forward and down in a slow, CONTROLLED movement, without a sudden drop into the bottom position.

I suggest 10 reps of each daily, starting with the Scap Pull-ups, then the Reverse-Butterfly and finally the Butterfly-Prep. If you want a grip challenge try 10 of each in sequence, nice and slow, without coming off the bar.

When the PT room is not occupied please feel free to use the rack there to experience the surprisingly quick effect of these neck pain release / shoulder warm ups and let us know if they helped you.