A clinician demonstrates neck and upper back exercises for the early recovery phase after shoulder surgery. While wearing a sling, do basic neck movements: flexion, extension, lateral flexion, and rotation. Then practice scapular retractions by pinching your shoulder blades together without moving your arm or shrugging your shoulders.
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 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 and 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.
