Volleyball, tennis, baseball, and swimming are notorious for wrecking thousands of shoulders each year. But at a closer look, one finds that it's really not the sport that is to blame, it's poor conditioning. At Knight Physical Therapy, the shoulder specialist in Orange County, we see thousands of shoulder injuries a year and almost all of them can be prevented.



One of the most common shoulder injuries we see is rotator cuff tendonitis. With this injury, what you have is chronic shoulder pain but it's not excruciating pain. You can go out and still spike, serve, pitch, and swim but the minute you get home, the pain starts. At night, the pain is worse and it's constantly sore. However, by the next day, you'll be fine so you think everything is ok and you go out and do it all again. That's the problem with tendonitis, it hurts but it doesn't hurt enough to kill you so you keep on playing.

We have a lot of parents coming in to see us and asking for a miracle to help their sons/daughters get over this shoulder tendonitis pain. We always tell them the same thing, ?rest.? You have to rest a rotator cuff tendonitis. If you're playing 4 times a week and practicing 5 times on top of that, you're not going to heal. It is simple physics, nothing complicated.

If you take a piece of rope and run it over a corner, sooner or later, that rope is going to break. It doesn't matter how thick that rope is, it's going to break. Your shoulder muscles are the same way. If you keep playing with pain, the muscles are going to tear, just like the rope.

Now with shoulder rehabilitation, most conventional physical therapy treatments take too long. At Knight Physical Therapy in Orange County, our treatment approach to a shoulder tendonitis is a little different. We use acupressure massage and yoga stretching to alleviate shoulder pain for hundreds of athletes throughout Orange County. This technique works well because the acupressure relieves the tensions in the muscles, release endorphins (your body natural pain killers), and increase circulation to injured tissues. After the pain subsides and the shoulder is pain free for a week, we progress the patient to yoga stretching geared specifically for the shoulder. This combination is much more effective for pain and improving flexibility in the shoulder than any other methods we know of.

Strengthening the shoulder is more an art form than science. You have to understand what it is that is causing the pain in the first place for the athlete. Is it in the forward motion or is it in the set up? These are important questions because they give you the information to set up customized rehabilitation program versus a general program. Are you working with a throwing muscle or a stabilizing muscle? If you don't know the answer to these questions, you can't have an effective shoulder rehabilitation program.

If you're in Orange County and you have shoulder pain, give Knight Physical Therapy a try. You won't be disappointed and will have pain relief in that shoulder in no time.

Author Bio ? Dr. Alan Cheng is the owner of Knight Physical Therapy, The Best Physical Therapy in Orange County, visit www.knightpt.com today for more information.