A clinician shows exercises to start the day after shoulder surgery: elbow bends, wrist and hand movements, neck stretches, and shoulder blade squeezes. The focus is reducing pain and swelling while keeping joints mobile during early healing.
Now we're going to illustrate some basic exercises that you can do starting the day after your shoulder surgery. One of the first exercises is to go ahead and start to move the elbow up and down, keeping the shoulder isolated, but getting as much bending and straightening of the elbow as you can. The other thing you can do is help to move your hand and wrist up and down as well. And then you can do some squeezes with your hand. All these exercises are really designed to help minimize pain, minimize swelling, and help maintain motion of your other joints as you heal from your shoulder surgery. The next set of exercises are designed to help keep mobility in the upper back and neck. You can start with some normal neck exercises for moving forward and backward, or flexion and extension exercises. This will just help, help keep the neck loose as you wear your sling. Also, you can go side to side, tipping one ear down to the shoulder on each side. And then rotation will help maintain normal motion in the neck as well. One of the important exercises after a shoulder surgery is to maintain motion of your shoulder blades or scapula. What you want to do is bring the shoulder blades back with careful attention not to move the shoulder joint itself. The arm should stay right in line with the body but should move straight back. One also wants to make sure that you're not lifting the shoulders up, but instead trying to bring them straight back, trying to think about pinching them together in the back. As you see here, he's going ahead and pinching his shoulder blades together without moving the shoulder and arm and without raising his shoulders up.
