Anterior shoulder pinching during overhead movements often comes from a tight posterior shoulder. This cross-body stretch targets the back of the shoulder by pulling your arm across your body, with cues to avoid twisting your torso or shrugging.
If you're feeling some pinching in the front of your shoulder with rotation or with bringing arm up overhead, sometimes a really helpful exercise can be stretching out the posterior aspect or the back of the shoulder. Sometimes the capsule that surrounds the shoulder or the muscles in the back of the shoulder can get tight. What happens then is they can actually push the humeral head— the humerus is this muscle, excuse me, this bone right here— forward, causing it to be difficult to get arm up overhead and causing some of that pinching. There's a million reasons why there's pinching in the front of the shoulder, but I found this one to be helpful for a lot of people. So, So all we're going to do is a simple cross-body stretch. Arm is going to come up and over across the body, and you're going to pull with other arm over and across. You should feel a good stretch through this area right here. Play with which way hand needs to go to feel like a little bit more of a stretch for you. Make sure that you're not twisting body, and make sure you're not allowing shoulder to rise up or pull down. Give it a try.
