31 Jul The 4 Best Exercises for Shoulder Health
One of the most common questions we get asked is, “What are some of the best things that I can do to keep my shoulders healthy?”
And while we are all individually unique, there are a few things that immediately come to mind and universally apply.
THE LIFESPAN AND ANATOMY OF THE SHOULDER
Before we dive into those exercises, it’s important to understand the shoulder a bit more. To start, the shoulder is made up of 2 main bones that form a ball and socket joint. That design allows us to complete a huge variety of super human feats such as throwing a ball at high speeds, perform pull-ups, complete Olympic barbell lifts to finer more intricate tasks like scratching our back. All of these things are made possible by way of rotation within the shoulder (aka -spinning of the ball on/in socket).
But that same design also places a great demand on the movers (or muscles of the shoulder) because of its tremendous freedom to contort and move in infinite directions. Movement and precision control of the shoulder are primarily generated by the rotator cuff muscles.
Lastly, the amount of space within the shoulder that the rotator cuff is given to operate is small.
Usually by the 3rd to 4th decade in life and with normal aging, those spaces progressively get tighter. As a result, the function of the rotator cuff muscles becomes more important to maintain as you continue to patina.
So here are the 4 main exercises that we feel that everyone should be able to do to maintain shoulder health:
- Shoulder T’s
2. Shoulder Angels
3. Facepull to W to Y
4. Muscle Snatch
CONCLUSION
While these look easy, we challenge you to get really good at these and to visit these frequently. The nice thing about these exercises is that they don’t consume tremendous amounts of time to complete and don’t necessarily have to be heavy in nature. You can also do these in between sets to maximize your time.
In good health,
~Kingsley