Throwing is More Than Just Your Shoulder

With this in mind, I will use an example of a patient that recently was seen for his shoulder pain.

He was a baseball player that had shoulder pain that limited his ability to throw. He had a bit of a history of injuries from playing high school football and baseball. He had shoulder surgery to fix a torn labrum. The surgery was successful, and he had returned to playing baseball at his college.

As he went through the season, his pain returned…just like prior to the surgery.

He was frustrated and afraid that he had re-injured his shoulder and would require surgery…again!

As he presented to my office for another opinion on what to do, I asked about what he had done in his previous rehabilitation following the surgery. He named all the standard exercises for the shoulder that you need to do following the surgery.

You might not have guessed, but the throwing motion requires using much more of you than just the arm and shoulder.

So the part (labrum) was “fixed,” so the shoulder was “fixed.”…or so he thought…. Time to get back to throwing, right? Then his pain returned.

However, he never mentioned being taught any exercises for the rest of his body.

Consequently, the shoulder was never assisted by the rest of the body in its work to throw. This led to increased stress on the shoulder and a return of the pain.

Back to the point, the throwing motion is MORE than the sum of your body parts.

He began lower body exercises, core strengthening and retraining, and shoulder blade focused exercises. By focusing on connecting the lower body to the core and transferring that force through the shoulder blade to the arm, the stresses across the shoulder were actually reduced.

Subsequently, the final result was that he could throw a ball 12-miles per hour faster without any shoulder pain. Also of note, he was able to hit the ball better and farther, with much more power because of getting the entire body into his motion.