I spotted this on Huffington the other day. I do not ascribe to oddball medical techniques. But, i have a rotor problem and my shoulder hurts. i play racketball sometimes as many as 15 hours a week. Always more than 10. I have not been playing well lately due to shoulder pain. I can not shoot overhead shots ,and I have some shots throughout the range of motion that hurt.
So., this technique is free and I tried it. I played the best racketball yesterday that in months. Almost no pain and almost complete range of motion.
So I have no explanations and will not offer any. But it worked very well for me.
This is somewhat off-topic. When your shoulder hurts due to watching television all day, you have a potator cuff injury.
IANAD, but I would say that at best, the technique described in that article only works in limited cases. There are lots of different ways a rotator cuff can be damaged, and varying degrees of damage.
I had a torn rotator cuff repaired by surgery four years ago. It wasn’t acute, i.e., caused by a single injury. I had for years felt pain when doing certain weightlifting exercises. And there were some simple motions where I had absolutely no strength and was subconsciously compensating. One example: aiming a pistol in front with both hands (the Weaver stance). My damaged arm was of no use unless I rotated my palm downwards, which I later learned was bringing the deltoid muscle in to help. I finally went to a sports medicine doctor, who diagnosed it.
The surgery was completely successful. But before deciding on surgery, the sports medicine doctor tried several less invasive fixes. First, some targeted exercises. When they didn’t work, he gave me a shot of cortisone. It felt better, but only for about a week. We then did an MRI which showed the tear to be too big to be fixed by anything but surgery. (I can’t stress enough how complex and counterintuitive rotator cuff problems can be - the pain I was experiencing was minor compared to that of others I’d talked to, so I assumed my injury was as minor as theirs were. But it wasn’t. Have an expert look at it!)
The aftermath of the surgery was a pretty major hassle. Arm in a sling for a month. No use of the arm for another month, and a third month where I could use the arm, but not lift anything with it, not even a can of soda. Physical therapy three times a week. But after I got back in shape, I was amazed at the improvement. The surgery didn’t just make it stop hurting, it repaired something that was broken.
If they can do that with yoga, I am immensely impressed. But I think the yoga would only work if the damage was minor enough that other non-invasive fixes would also work.
It would be interesting if we had access to MRIs of the shoulders this technique worked on. The rotator cuff, as it’s name does NOT suggest, is more of a region defined by the seven major muscles that hold the humerus and scapula in place to form the shoulder joint. You can damage any of these muscles in any number of ways ranging from strains/minor sprain to complete detachment. No yoga maneuver is going to reattach a muscle to a bone. Because of the number of muscles involved, however, it might “retrain” the healthier ones to compensate for the damage.
As the article suggests, the surrounding muscles take over and kind of put the damaged muscles in the background. It surely does not repair anything.
I did it with zero faith in it. So it was not a psychological effect. But my shoulder has greatly improved. It is anecdotal ,much like those in the story. But he did do a study with 150 people.
My attitude. It couldn’t hurt and may be a panacea for you.
I am too old to undergo surgery and expect to get back to racketball. I expected to play hurt for years. This chaanges that equation for the better.
I wouldn’t call this a fix, but it’s great if it can help even one person I suppose.
I’m a yoga instructor who does at least a few headstands a week (and they do feel great), and someone with chronic shoulder impingement and rotator cuff pain and issues. Yoga has helped me learn how to keep from seriously re-injuring my shoulders, and how to keep other muscles from compensating for my weakness there (which can lead to other problems). I also use many common techniques/exercises physical therapists recommend to strengthen the small muscles of the rotator cuff. I’m glad your shoulder is feeling better.