The Little-Known Reason Your Shoulder Hurts

The Little-Known Reason Your Shoulder Hurts

Every serious lifter learns one unfortunate truth: Lift long enough and hard enough, and sooner or later you will hurt your shoulder. 

Most of us know to avoid the obvious culprits, like behind-the-neck presses, which put the shoulders into the dreaded "high five" position. Some of us have even gotten the memo to do at least as many pulling as pushing exercises. 

But pulling exercises can create a problem of their own, called anterior humeral glide. Which, yes, sounds like something you get penalized for in Olympic figure skating (especially if the Russian judge is in a bad mood that day). And, like skating deductions, it usually happens because you're trying too hard.

Say you're doing a rowing exercise on a cable machine, using a straight-bar attachment. Each repetition has a natural stopping point: when the bar reaches your abdomen. At that point, your elbows are more or less even with your torso.

Naturally, you think that a longer range of motion must be better. So you do a one-arm row, or a two-arm row with handles that allow you to pull past your abdomen. 

Bad idea, as Eric Cressey explains in this video:

When your elbow goes behind your torso, the top of your upper-arm bone--the humerus--slips forward to the edge of the shoulder socket, where it has less support, and where connective tissues are strained as they try to keep the shoulder together. Hence, anterior (forward) humeral (upper-arm) glide. 

Your shoulder joint is like a busy intersection even when you do everything right. Most of your upper-body muscles attach to either your humerus or shoulder blades, bringing with them a list of tendons and ligaments long enough to fill a chapter in a biology textbook. If one of them gets irritated and inflamed, they're all inconvenienced. That's how you get shoulder pain (and traffic jams, for that matter).

Easiest way to avoid anterior humeral glide? Stop each rep when your elbows are even with your torso. Now you have one less way to hurt your shoulders . . . leaving just 50 more to figure out. 

Lou Schuler, C.S.C.S., is an award-winning journalist and the coauthor (with Alwyn Cosgrove) of The New Rules of Lifting Supercharged.

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