The "Side" Of My Shoulder Hurts
With your shoulders a multitude of problems can arise on your journey to getting jacked and tan.
Often times, it’s as simple as looking in the opposite direction and prioritizing it more. If you do a lot of presses and you’re getting pain in the front of your shoulder your body is simply asking for more balance and doing more pulling exercises for your back would remedy it quickly.
A more complex issue is no pain during pressing, but pain when you pull your arm away or toward your body (called abduction and adduction respectively).
It’s not quite the front of your shoulder but also not the back, riiiiiiight on the side. An easy way to diagnose this is a simple external rotation exercise. If pain is caused during this movement it’s likely your rotator cuff.
Your rotator cuff is comprised of four small moves that quite literally rotate your shoulder. Luckily, Simple external and internal rotation exercises done in sets of 15-25 with a slow tempo is a way to solve this issue.
If the seated external rotation exercise gives you no pain, it’s a little bit trickier. Instead of focusing on the rotation, focus more on the patterning and stability for your shoulder. An easy exercise is putting a band around your wrists with your elbows at your side and simply squeezing (retracting) your shoulder blades. Your wrists will naturally come out a bit and you’ll hold that for 5-10s for 5-10 reps. This is for stability.
Taking it a step further, since there’s no pain in your pressing forward or overhead, end each set of any presses you do with a 10s hold while focusing on that same shoulder blade position (down and back). Over time, this will help your shoulders create more strength (torque) and be more stable so that you’re relying less on the side of your shoulder (lateral deltoid).