Welcome another Healthy Melton Blog

1. Know Your Shoulder.

What I mean by this is really think about where the pain is coming from. Usually, shoulder bursitis cause sharp pain and some ache afterwards. This is because the bursa is swollen and is often in association with shoulder impingement. That is a complete other topic for another blog. The more you impinge or pinch your shoulder the more bursitis you get. The result is more pain and less movement. What you need to do is;

Avoid what hurts if you can. Every time you cause pain with shoulder bursitis you are going back wards. Do this and you are one step close to fixing your shoulder pain.

2. Reduce Inflammation

Fixing shoulder pain also includes reducing the inflammation. Since the issue is the bursa is inflamed and swollen leading to impingement and more irritation of the bursa. There are two main ways to get this area of shoulder bursitis under control. The natural way (getting on Tumeric or fish oil) or the pharmaceutical way with anti-inflammatories such as voltaren. Essentially, if we reduce the inflammation then we will reduce the size of the bursa, it does not impinge any more and we start to get better.

Consider anti-inflammatories to help fix shoulder pain.

3. Stretching to Fix Shoulder Pain

Ok, now we have started to reduce the pain we are onto the next best way to resolve your shoulder bursitis pain. You need to start with passive stretches for your shoulder. Ones where you don’t use the muscles in your arm or shoulder. The two best ways to passively stretch are with over the door pulleys (see the picture). Secondly, you can walk you hand up the wall until you reach the point of slight pain and then slide it down and repeat 10 times. The goal with these shoulder stretches for bursitis is to do them with little pain and slowly increase your range.

You need to passively stretch. Keep moving your shoulder passively if it stiffens up it will get worse.

4. Exercises to Fix Shoulder Pain.

If you are going to beat your bursitis of the shoulder you will need to strengthen the muscle around the joint. This will allow it to function correctly and not pinch the bursa. The best shoulder exercise for bursitis is to build the rotator cuff up. These muscles help line the joint up no matter where your arm is, essentially stopping the impingement. I have attached a great video to show you the best exercise, all credit to the author they did a great job.

Do rotator cuff exercises to strengthen and stabilise your shoulder.

5. Get moving.

As your shoulder pain reduced move more to increase your range of pain-free shoulder motion. At this stage the inflammation should have settled so you can also start to apply heat (wheat bag or hot shower) this will also increase your range of motion. The connective tissue will be stiff around the shoulder so heat before you exercise to warm the tissue up and increase your range of motion.