Bob & Brad - How to Fix Shoulder Pain in Seconds (This Works!)

Intro song

♪ Bob and Brad ♪ ♪ The two most famous physical therapists ♪ ♪ On the internet ♪

About Us

Hi folks. I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.

I'm Brad Heineck, physical therapist.

Together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet.

In our opinion, of course, Bob.

We're rejoined by Napoleon Bonaparte. We haven't seen you in a while, Napoleon. Hope things have been going well. Today we're going to talk about how to fix shoulder pain in seconds, and this does work. I know because I'm actually using it on my shoulder right now.

Right, and not only that, we've used it on our patients over the years. We just don't pick these things out of the air.

All right, before we do that...

Oh yes.

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(chuckling) Right through the lens.

Yep.

How to fix shoulder pain in seconds intro

All right. So these are five exercises, and how you can do this in seconds is, I just want you to do one of these exercises every few hours. And it only takes you seconds to do it. So I'm not telling you to... everybody's busy, nobody has time for pain. It's interesting, I just had one of our aides. She hurt her knee and she goes, "I don't have time for this." And it's right. You don't have time for your shoulder pain. So you don't have time to rehab it either. So I'm going to show you things you can do throughout the day, maybe even in the office or wherever you work.

Right, so you're going to try all of these and only do the ones that are successful, because more than likely, not all five will work on one person. It's usually one or two that are going to be successful. So work with them.

Exactly. Find the ones that are working for you and stick with it. The thing we're trying to treat here mainly is what we'd call impingement, because impingement often leads to rotator cuff problems. I'd say about 80% of the shoulders that we see are having this difficulty.

Right, as a matter of fact, our hanging book has studies saying this is the primary source of shoulder pain. Not all of it, but a majority.

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So very quickly, we're going to show you what impingement is. It often occurs from poor posture, leaning forward like this or being hunched forward. What that causes is you have the humeral head here, and it goes into the socket here, the glenoid fossa, and you have a tendon going over here. That's what this red thing is. If there's not enough room in there, what's going to happen when you lift the arm is it pinches. I don't know if you can catch that at all.

Can you get it?

I'm going to show the healthy way. This is it. You have a gap in there.

Plenty of room.

The joint drops down where it's supposed to, and the rotator cuff is doing what it's supposed to. Unhealthy shoulder (vocalizes) pinch. That's about where you get it: when your shoulder's around 90 degrees, it starts to pinch. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

What to do

And what happens over time is you start to saw away at that tendon, and you can actually get a rotator cuff tear. You can tear the muscle. It throws everything off. So these exercises are designed to get you a little more room in there.

Right, so we eliminate that impingement, or that squeezing, pinching, nasty owie, painful stuff.

All right, the first one is the one that I've been doing. Without going into too much detail, I have a little bit of winging on this scapula because I lost a muscle when I was younger. I had nerve damage.

Maybe you could go find it.

Yeah. Maybe I could find it. (laughing sarcastically) So this one tends to come forward more than the other ones. Every so often, and this is something you do throughout the day, you want to do shoulder squeezes. They're very easy to do. You can do them no matter where you are. You can do them standing. You can do them sitting. I'm just going to go ahead and bend my elbows, and I'm going to squeeze my shoulder blades together.

There you go. You can see the wrinkling of his clothes, showing that movement of those shoulder blades, from this side...

Are you saying I just got my clothes out of the hamper?

Yeah, they're wrinkled. You've got to get them taken in, Bob. Once again, to the press.

Yeah, pressure on. Well, not pressure on, I'm sorry. One, two, three, four, five. I usually do...

Is that you? You count it like that in your head?

One, two, three, four, five, yeah.

Everyone's got their own little ways. I just go hold, and then it's kind of... that's my mantra. Hold, relax.

By strengthening... you mind coming over here, Matt?

I don't know.

I called you Matt. Brad.

Wow.

Matt's my son.

(Brad chuckling) By strengthening these muscles, you're strengthening the core of the shoulder. That helps. If these are held back right here, it puts the shoulder in the right position. So instead of being like this, they're back like this, and that's where you want them to be.

Right, they work much more efficiently and with less pain.

The next technique... that's one. I definitely want all of you doing that one. That's one I want you to slip in throughout the day. The next one is our Mulligan technique, which we're a big fan of. You can just do this off the back of a chair. Again, this helps set that humeral head down in the socket, to give you more room for the tendon to glide through.

Right, maybe you should do it on the other arm so they can see.

So I'm right here. I'm pushing down into the chair. While I push down into the chair, I walk away, and this is my bad shoulder. This is the one I should be doing it on. I can feel this actually stretch really well.

So you're pushing, not straight down this way, but down and kind of towards your toes. So it's going that way.

Hear that crack?

Oh, I didn't hear it, but I believe you. It's always louder to the person who has it, but you can see his range of motion.

That's it again.

Yeah. I did hear that. Audible crepitus. That's what we call it in the field.

So we're trying again, and it is a sneaky way of getting more motion. It's a sneaky way of getting more gap.

Right. With this technique, if you're unable to do it but you can do it without pain, it's the right thing. But I've had some patients do this...

And they didn't like it.

Right. It's painful. It creates some sharp pain. If that's the case, that one goes off the list, and we go to the next one. Did you want to show it with the Booyah Stiks?

Oh sure! No, actually, why don't you, Bob?

Okay, so if you have one of our Booyah Stiks, you could use the Booyah Stik. You can do it one of two ways. You can walk away from it, like this, or you can push down and move it that way, like this. Either way works, but it works out really well to walk away and push down the entire time.

Sure, and if you don't have a Booyah Stik and you don't want to buy one, we've had people comment that they're using the broom handle or something.

Yeah. Absolutely.

You've got to do it on carpet or something so it sticks. That's what we have these nice rubber ends for.

Or the back of a chair, like I just did. So the next one is shoulder extension. Now we're going to start working on bringing the shoulder back, like this, stretching this area out here. Again, making more room for the shoulder to do its job and work correctly.

Stretch 2

And we talked about the people who started these. Mulligan is a famous physical therapist. I think he's getting up there in age, and I think he's still alive. He's got a whole system.

There's a McKenzie technique.

McKenzie technique too. Yep.

He's developed his own system that's popular worldwide in the therapy world.

So we're working on increasing the amount that the arm goes back. Brad, I thought you showed really well on the countertop there. Oh, we've got a messy countertop.

Oh, look at it. We've got an arm here. We've got my glasses. We've got a screwdriver. We've been busy today, Bob.

Yeah, we've been busy.

So, in the early phase, when your shoulder's tight, you may just go up to the counter here and get your good posture. Then you just squat gently. Right now, as I do that, it extends my shoulder. You just go until you feel some pain, not much, then you come off it. A little pain, off. We go to pressure on, but not into the pain. You never go into sharp pain. When the range of motion starts to get better, it's like, "Oh, this is getting much better, much less pain." Along with that, you're going to find that going in front is easier. The more you open up the cupboard, the better. Some people say we've got a crooked cupboard door on here.

Yeah, we tried to fix that too.

So here we go. This is for a high level, for someone whose shoulders are really doing well. They just want to get it to, you know, maybe for their baseball thrower or pitcher... thrower. (both chuckling) Yeah. I'm in it today, Bob.

Tosser.

Tosser, yeah. One way or another. There you go. You can use other things in the house for stretching.

Yeah, things that end up being the right level for you. Go ahead and use it. All right. Next one. Again, you don't need to do all of these. I have all of you doing the shoulder squeezes. With the other ones, find out which one seems to be working best for you, decreasing your pain. This one's a really easy one. You just use a belt, and you're going to go ahead and... let's see, how do we do this?

This is a little challenging to get set up.

Yeah, there we go.

Use a belt that is smooth and shiny, because you're going to do it with clothing, and you'll find out why in just a second here. Sometimes if you have a little help...

If I can get my hand here.

There you go. That's where you want to get to.

That's what I was trying to do.

So this arm is relaxed, so we're trying...

I'm going to show you this. Quite often what you're going to find is the tight arm is down here, whereas the other arm I can put way up here. I want to get this arm up to equal with that one. So you're just going to go pressure on, pressure off. This belt really does work well.

I know it's...

Once you get it set up, it takes a little bit of doing, but it slides really well.

As a matter of fact, we did a video a number of years ago on a patient who was set up for shoulder surgery. Then she said, "Can I do therapy?" And the surgeon said, "Well, go ahead, you can do it." Within four visits, she was doing this exercise. No surgery needed.

Wow.

Her arm was going from here to here. She canceled the surgery, and I still see her, and it's still in good shape.

Wow. Nice. Yeah. There are some miracles every minute in the Bob and Brad clinic, right?

(laughing) There you go. All right, the last one we're going to do is this one. You're going to need some equipment. You need a place to hang. Brad and I have become big fans of this. Oh no, do we have our book around? Go ahead and start hanging? I'll search.

Yeah, I think it's right up there by the prescription sunglasses or whatever. But are you over here, Liz? Don't worry about Bob. He's just looking through our library.

Yeah, here we go.

Quote, unquote. But yeah, you just need a hanging bar, and you're simply going to relax and hang. When I first heard of this, I thought, this is crazy. It's going to make the impingement worse. But once I read the book, understood the mechanics, started trying it, and we started working with people doing it, it's like, yeah, this can be really effective.

Shoulder extension

Yeah. We've become big fans. It's such an easy thing to do if you have the equipment, and you can wear gloves to make it easier. The book is "Shoulder Pain, the Solution and Prevention." It's by John M. Kirsch, MD. We have it in our favorite books, don't we?

Yeah, we do. Yep, he's an orthopedic surgeon. As a matter of fact, he does his practice 30 miles from where I grew up, in Wisconsin.

Does he really?

Yeah. Stevens Point.

Oh cool.

Yeah. My daughter went to Stevens Point.

There you go. It's a nice town.

Yeah, it is.

It's got a river running through it and everything.

Go to Stevens Point too.

There you go. So here you're going to hang 10 to 30 seconds, depending on what you tolerate, up to three repetitions. And depending on how you respond to it, the first time you do it you might get sore, but after you do it for a few days, you'll be able to do this two to three times per day. We've really had good success with this.

McKenzie technique

And you still said seconds. Remember, we promised seconds. Yeah. So it's 30 seconds.

There you go.

Out of your day, and you can make a great improvement.

Oh, that's right. We've got to stick with our title.

All right. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Remember, we can fix just about anything...

Except...

A broken heart.

There it is. Boom, boom.

But we're working on it.

We'll never stop.