Dr. Patrick J. Denard, a shoulder specialist, demonstrates four stretches for frozen shoulder and post-injury recovery. Do them 2-3 times daily, holding each for 10 seconds, 10 reps. The stretch should feel like a gentle release, never sharp pain.
Hi, I'm Patrick Denard, a shoulder specialist at Southern Oregon Orthopedics, and in this segment I want to share with you some stretching exercises that we recommend for regaining mobility in the shoulder. Most commonly we use these for adhesive capsulitis or frozen shoulder But these exercises can also be used for other conditions such as recovering after an injury or after surgery. We like to keep the exercises as simple as possible, so I'm going to show you some exercises that are going to help regain motion in the front, the underside, and the back of the shoulder. The two key things with these exercises are timing, so you want to be consistent. I like to have people do these exercises 2 to 3 times a day and to hold each stretch 10 seconds doing 10 reps. The second thing that comes up for people is, what is a good amount of stretch? And what I like to tell somebody is a good stretch should be one where your shoulder or body relaxes as you're doing it. That is, the pain decreases. It should not be going the other way. If you're getting a sharp pain, that's your body telling you that you're doing too much. The first stretch we're going to show you is the doorframe stretch. The doorframe stretch is probably the most important stretch for frozen shoulder. What we do here is we put the wrist and the elbow against the doorframe., and then you're going to simply turn your whole body away from that position, and that really stretches the front of the shoulder. The next part of your shoulder you want to stretch is the undersurface. There's 2 exercises that are good for that. The first one you can do in combination with the doorframe stretch, which is where you simply just take your arm straight up the doorframe and then lean forward. Again, holding that stretch for about 10 seconds. Next, we have 2 stretches that are performed while lying down. The first stretch is just an overhead stretch that's also used to stretch the undersurface of the shoulder. Here the arm is taken and the opposite arm is used to help push the arm back, really emphasizing that forward flexion stretch. This is a good one to start with, especially if somebody can't take their arm up the doorframe. So a couple of tips here for this stretch. One is you can perform it in different tilt positions, so it can be done while somebody's lying back and get the stretch, and then lying straight up and down, and then finally leaning into it. This will really help get different parts of the back of the shoulder. The other thing you can do is change arm position slightly. You can come down further or come up further depending on your comfort. The last stretch that can be used for regaining mobility in the back of the shoulder is doing a cross arm adduction stretch. Here we take the arm across the body and simply use the opposite hand to pull in. That's really going to stretch the back of the shoulder again.
