Jeff Cavaliere

there's a little bony bump on the top of your humerus that's actually getting stuck on the upper portion of your shoulder joint there.

So now bring your arm down, open up your chest as much as you can, turn your arm out a little bit, now raise it up overhead and it goes higher.

Why?

Because you just created external rotation inside the joint that allows it now to go up in a higher position.

But what happens if

you're chronically in this position of internal rotation and you go to raise your arm, you go to wash your hair, you go to get stuff out of the cabinet, you go to do all the things you do every day.

Every time with there being less space in there, there's more likelihood to pinch on a supraspinatus tendon.

There's more likelihood to be pinched on a bursa.

And every time we pinch, we potentially inflame and cause more swelling inside that joint, which causes less joint space.

So you're inflaming those tissues, more compression in that joint, and then more pain ultimately, and then that winds up causing down the road things like partial thickness tears and tears of the rotator cuff that we don't want.

So internal rotation...

in this elevated position is not good.

Having external rotation abilities or strength that can help to centralize what it really does when people talk about rotator cuff training is yes, you're working the external rotators, but what its main job is to actually keep that ball centered in the middle of the socket.

I see.

So as you go and you raise your arm up in an internally rotated dominant shoulder, it will migrate up.

Why?

Because the deltoid pulls up.

So as you're raising your shoulder up, the deltoid is pulling that humerus up and the internal rotation of the

Other muscles are already too tight, chronically tight, or just keeping it in the front side anyway.

So you're lifting your arm up and you're getting very little space.