If you do, you’ve come to the right place.

In this video, I’m going to talk about how we help shoulder pain, which can be good if you’re trying to find someone local to where we are, and you want to get a sense of how we work.

Or if you’re watching this and you’re not local, like one of our many US subscribers, it will hopefully give you a little bit of a framework that you can use to start working on your own neck, shoulder pain.

This is the second in a two parter. And the first part was how to help neck pain because neck and shoulder pain really go together.

I’ll link that below if you want to watch it.

Welcome, or welcome back.

My name is Katherine, I’m the Founder and Principal Therapist of LSM Clinic, Sport and Remedial Massage Therapy Clinic in East London.

In this channel, I talk about how the body works and simple self care tips that you can include into your day to help you enjoy your favourite activities and live your life as close to pain free as possible.

Today we’re going to talk about shoulder pain and how we help shoulders.

You may be wondering, why am I going into this when this is what we do? Like shouldn’t it be a trade secret?

I said this analogy in the first one, I’ll say it again. (if you want to skip it, just go to the next section of shoulder pain in general in the video)

The way I look at it is some people like to bake a cake and some people like to buy a cake, right?

If you’d like to bake a cake, you’d like to get the ingredients, you’d like to experiment, maybe like the process, you know.

It’s not going to be like as fancy or in depth or complicated as like a professional cake would be from like someone who’s an expert at it, but you still like the process, right?

If you want to buy a cake, you don’t really care about knowing how to do it because you’re planning on just buying the cake.

You might want to know how the person makes the cake to get an idea if you think you’ll like the cake that they make, like what ingredients do they use? What techniques, do they have anything in it that you’re allergic to, right?

Usually I find that people who want to buy a cake, aren’t going to take the descriptions that I give and use them.

And the people who want to use the descriptions I give either don’t want to buy a cake, or there’s some sort of financial or time prohibition, that means that they don’t have the time, or finances to go and pay for someone to help them. This at least gives them a way to do it themselves.

I do find that a lot of times people come to us and they say, you know, I saw you describe how you work, and it sounded like something that would work with me.

That’s why I share this and that’s why I’m doing this series because there will be more than just the neck and the shoulder one.

Shoulder pain in general can be very tricky.

One of the reasons that it’s so tricky is because we have so many muscles that attach across our shoulder.

I’ll say a few, but I’m not going to say all of them because there are so many.

There’s pec major. There’s pec minor. There’s serratus anterior. There’s the lats. There’s the four muscles of the rotator cuff, which is infraspinatus, supraspinatus, subscapularis, and teres minor, I believe. Teres major also crosses over the shoulder.

The biceps and the deltoids crossover. I’m going to stop now because I said I wouldn’t say all of them. But what that means is that – I hope it didn’t say all of them, I don’t think I did.

Anyway, what that means is you have all of these muscles crossing over our shoulder and the shoulder joint is not like a super stable joint. There’s the glenohumeral joint, which is the humerus attaching to the torso and then there’s the scapula kind of how it’s on the thorax the upper back.

The glenohumeral joint, which is where our arm goes is like the arm is like this.

This is the joint it goes into. It’s not like this really stable ball and socket joint. It’s more of a shallow curve.

You can imagine that if you get, you know, a muscle like this, that’s going to affect it.

If it’s being pulled forward, that’s going to affect it. It’s very, very easy for the muscles to be tight. Usually there are multiple muscles that are tight, being pulled out of alignment, creating problems with the shoulder.

Now, as we talked about briefly in the neck video, one of the biggest things we see is that pec minor and pec major and sometimes lats and serratus anterior, were pulling your shoulders forward. The pec minor kind of brings it up and over pec major kind of breaks it around. Lats kind of bring it over and down – you get the idea.

When we’re looking at working on someone’s shoulders, they might have pain in the top of their shoulders.

They might have pain between the shoulder blades.

They might feel a pinch somewhere in their shoulder in the back, in the front, in the top.

You know, when they do this, they might get pain, or they might get pain here. But almost always, if we just open up the body, put the shoulders in the right position and open up the chest, that significantly improves the vast majority of shoulder problems that we see.

I’m not saying it fixes all of them. But it gives us a jump in improvement in a way that a lot of other techniques don’t, which is one of the reasons we always start with that.

I’ll always remember, I had a guy come in, and he had back pain, it was like upper back, like shoulder pain. I told him to go face up. And he’s like, ‘Well, you know, it’s my back is the problem, my back is the problem.’

He couldn’t even lift his arms past, like here, when we did the tests. I said, just give me two minutes, just let me do your chest we’ll retest, it’s not going to take long and if it doesn’t do anything, I’ll give you the extra two minutes back on your back.

I got him on the table, did the chest had him stand up.

He stands up and immediately his face is like, oh, my gosh, my back feels so much better. He could raise his arms to here now, which of course is not the perfect my arms or anything. It’s not the perfect alignment. But it was a significant improvement.

He’d been getting massages for years, and no one had ever worked his chest. So I cannot overstate how important it is to get the shoulders in a mechanically better position, right? Because you can just even think the tracking is not going to be as good. If it’s kind of like this, I can’t really do that with my fingers and my hands.

We talked about various kinds of shoulder pain, and briefly mentioned the muscles that we’re looking at.

Side note, one of the reasons that I’m doing this two part series is because I am releasing a neck and shoulder pain guide.

It takes everything that I know about neck and shoulder pain, all the exercises, self assessment, all the things like that, and basically tells you how to incorporate them into your life tells you how to assess to prioritise the exercises, how to structure it, like goes into all of this that I’m talking about in a lot more detail.

If this is something that’s of interest to you, the link to either pre order or order is going to be in the description depending on when you’re seeing this and when I like finish editing and getting it out.

If you’d like more detail about it, I strongly recommend that you check out that guide. So we talked about the muscles, and like the ways that they pull them out of alignment.

Similar to the neck video, we often will get pain in the back of the body.

The tops of the shoulders, the back of the shoulder blades, the between the shoulder blades and we focus on releasing that when actually the strain is coming from us being pulled forward and back is overworking to compensate for that.

That’s why we always want to give you a structural balance and kind of get you back into a balanced place before we do any work on where you feel the pain.

We also want to look at your posture.

Posture is a really big thing with shoulders because most things will revolve around, are you in the correct position when you’re doing it, right?

Are you, is your chest open, are your shoulder blades on your back, are your arms by your side? Do you have good position when you’re working at your desk? Do you have good mechanics when you’re walking around.

The worse your mechanics are, the more muscle tension you’ll get that kind of holds you in that place and then it’s harder kind of be in the right position.

Now, if you feel like good posture is uncomfortable, I totally understand. There’s a reason it’s uncomfortable and I have a video about that that I can link below.****

However, if you check out our desk worker workshop, it talks about how you can have better posture without it being uncomfortable, which will be included in the things you can do on your own.

An ideal position is you want to have your back, your shoulders over your hips, your shoulders open (I think I need a massage my shoulders aren’t even) and your chest open, but not like sticking out. You don’t want to arch your back but you want to be in alignment.

Things that you can do on your own.

First of all, check out that workshop that I mentioned, it’s free on our website.

It will walk you through what ideal posture is, how to have closer to ideal posture and still feel comfortable and it gives you a super sensible stretch that you can start with to open up your chest and make it easier to have your shoulders in the right position and it will take a lot of pressure off your neck and your shoulders.

Then, start to practice good posture.

If you want a more in depth guide, you can check out the guide.

I do also have a course which has like videos and worksheets and things, which I’ll link that below as well actually.

The things that you’re going to do on your own just to do a quick recap:

• is get that workshop so that you can get a get the stretch and get closer to better posture.
• start practising your posture.
• You can absolutely do the breathing visualisation because that will help your neck which can help your shoulders because they’re so interlinked.

If you want more detail, grab the neck & shoulder pain guide or book a session with us.

 If you have any questions or if you try anything or you know you want to know more about anything, feel free to get in touch.