What Are The Symptoms Of Rotator Cuff Injury. Trust Me You'll Know If You've Got One
Okay, so you've hurt your shoulder but how will you recognise what you have done to it? To start with your shoulder joint is made up of muscles, bones, ligaments, tendons and cartilage. If someone had come up with the idea of the shoulder they would be winning prizes for the flexibility and complexity of it. There are three different involved, The humerus, the collar bone and the scapula all feature. Seventeen different muscles plus the cartilage, tendons and ligaments. A couple of the most frequent injuries to people's shoulders are a frozen shoulder or a rotator cuff tear and it is best not to mix them up because the treatnments are quite different.
With a frozen shoulder the capsule surrounding the joint becomes damaged, resulting in a build up of scar tissue. The capsule contracts and any movement of the shoulder causes pain. However, if you have damaged your rotator cuff then you will only get pain with certain movements.
The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles that stabilize the shoulder and help with movement especially any movement that is above shoulder height. The shoulder joint is a very shallow ball and socket joint. Without the rotator cuff to keep the ball in place, we would put our shoulder out of joint everytime that we threw or lifted anything. These muscles are at risk whenever we are working at height, lifting or throwing. The commonest injuries to the rotator cuff are caused by wear and tera as we age, knocks or repetitive movements.
I damaged the supraspinatus which is one of the four rotator cuff muscles. Unfortunately it is the muscle that runs through a channel of bone on the acromion (part of the shoulder blade), so when it got injured and started to get enflammed I ended up with a shoulder impingement. The result was loss of strength in my arm, pain whenever I tried lifting my arm or moving it behind me. Tucking in my T-shirt, reaching out for a cup of coffee, lifting anything onto a shelf became painful and as time went by it just deteriorated.
What was happening was that the swollen, damaged tendon was now bunching up whenever I used it and getting impinged inside the channel of bone. The channel that it normally ran through was now too small, so everytime I used my arm in certain ways it was catching on the acromion and getting damaged more. So I had to rest it and wait for the inflammation to calm down. It is onlywhen you are forced to rest it that you realise just how much you use your arm and shoulder. You must not try to carry on because the pain is an indication that you are doing more damage, if you mage to ignore the pain, you could end up wearing completely through the tendon all together and that is a whole new problem.
Depending on the severity of the injury you may be advised to have surgery to release the trapped muscle in order that it can heal. But Rest, treatment of the inflammed tendon followed by exercises to build up the rotator cuff muscles may be all you need.
If you found this article interesting check out my full story at
www..myrotatorcuffcure.blogspot.com
My name is Nick Bryant and I tore my rotator cuff lifting something that was too heavy. Despite being told that I would need surgery I have managed a full recovery with just exercise. Check out one of my other articles on the rotator cuff
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