Intermediate Shoulder Rehab Exercises

This is an example of one of our intermediate exercises. This is called a table slide. Intermediate exercises will begin either the day after surgery or after you come out of the sling depending on your rehab protocol. The table slide, what you want to do is you want to be seated. You can pick a table just about above waist level. You put your hand on the table on something that will slide. Put your opposite arm, so in this case the left hand on top of the right hand and just simply slide forward. You want to go to the point where you feel a stretch, hold it there about 10 seconds. After you've done that, you can pull back and then repeat. As you continue to advance up to get further, you can kind of go and lean into it, putting your whole body into the motion. This is a great way to get restoration of movement in the forward elevation plane, and it's a good exercise because it's a closed chain exercise that reduces stress on the shoulder. The next exercise is passive external rotation with the arm at the side, also called a stick exercise. If you have a therapy kit, you can use the stick provided, or if you don't have that, you can just grab anything that's straight in your house such as a broom, a bat, or golf club. You want to take this stick and you want to place it in the palm of the hand. You see, this is the butt of the end of the stick. It's placed in the palm of the hand. You hold with the opposite arm and then you're just going to push out to the side. You want to go to the point where you feel the stretch and hold it 10 seconds. It's important when you do this here, you see the elbow staying at the side, it's not moving away from the body. We're keeping the elbows, we're just focusing on rotation straight out to the side.