Band tractions are a great tool to use to help with shoulder health.  It helps mobilize the shoulder joint and you can use them in different planes of motions.  The added tension from the band that kind of “pulls” the humeral head out of the socket while mobilizing the joint really helps loosening up the soft-tissue around it.

Band tractions are widely spread among powerlifters and really strong guys who bench press loads of weight.  A lot of them, swear by it and say it makes their shoulders feel better.  And honestly, until you try it you don’t understand how much better it makes your shoulders feel.  Whenever my shoulders feel beat up I’ll just add a couple of sets of band tractions at the end of my training sessions.

Here are a couple different movements you can do with them in different planes of motion.

It should never be painful, nor hurt your shoulder at all.  If this is the case, you probably have some bigger problems to deal with than just the need to mobilize your joint.

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Unless you have been living in a cave with no internet access for the past 6 years, you have probably heard of Eric Cressey before.  Eric is one of the industry’s leaders in strength and conditioning.  He is a well established coach, writer and business guy as he’s been owning his own facility for the last three years and has been coaching thousands of athletes in different sports.  Eric is also an accomplished lifter himself as he used to compete in powerlifting and he still deadlifts well over 600 pounds to this day.

Eric is also a VALUABLE source of information with all the material he’s written.  I would recommend all of his articles and products to anyone trying to become a better strength and conditioning coach.  To say that I have learned A LOT from Eric during the past few years would be an understatement.  Here is just a couple of things I have picked up from him lately. Enjoy!

1. Taking care of shoulder health is more than just strengthening the rotator cuff.

If you want to have healthy shoulders, you obviously need to take care of them in your training.  If you do some stretching and some strengthening exercises for the rotator cuff and think it’s taken care of, well, the sad truth is that you are leaving out a lot of very important factors that play a huge role in shoudler health.  Here is a list of all the things you should consider when working with people with bum shoulders or when trying to keep shoulders healthy:

1. Soft-tissue quality (primarily pec major and minor, levator scapula, scalenes, lats and rotator cuff)

2. Scapular stability

3. Thoracic spine mobility (in extension and rotation)

4. Range of motion at the gleno-humeral joint

5. Tissue length of the following: pec major and minor, levator scapula, lats and biceps.

6. Rotator cuff strength

7. Hip and ankle mobility of the opposite side (as the shoulder have fascial connections with these 2 joints)

8. Breathing patterns (as breathing through your chest instead of your belly can lead to over stressing muscles like the pecs and scalenes)

As you can see, there is a lot to address to prevent/treat shoulder injuries, and these factors happen to be even more important when dealing with athletes from sports like baseball, swimming and basketball, as these athletes put tremendous amounts of stress on their shoulders.

2. Soft tissue work and flexibility work go hand-in-hand.

Almost everyone by now knows that tissue length and tissue quality are of paramount importance to stay away from imbalances and injuries.  But did you also know that these 2 need to be combined for optimal results and lasting changes.  Once you work on your soft-tissue quality, whether it is with foam rolling, ART, Graston or just good ol’ massage, you should work on tissue quality right after.

Once you have removed the adhesions (or knots) in your muscles, doesn’t it make sense to stretch them right after, before you have new adhesions/knots reappear?  In fact, right after soft-tissue work, your muscles are more pliable and less resistant to any change in length, so you should take advantage of that time to “re-educate those tissues on how to deform properly” as Cressey put it himself.

3. Get out of those high heels!

Wearing conventional “high heeled” sneakers with a lot of cushioning and support around the ankles are probably the worst thing you can do to your feet and ankles.  It limits your range of motion at the ankle (especially in dorsiflexion) and it modifies the way you walk and run as you don’t have to absorb ground forces as much as all the padding in the soles is doing the job; your feet are basically becoming lazier.  You are also losing a good amount of proprioception in your feet as they are separated from the ground by a 1-2″ cushion.  And as Cressey said it himself: “…wearing sneakers has really screwed up the way people run, and in my opinion, has caused the exponential rise in injuries among distance runners.”  That doesn’t mean we should all ditch our sneakers, but I think we should definitely make better footwear choices.  Nike Frees, Puma flats and Vibram Five Fingers are all better options as they keep you closer to the ground.

Although not yet socially acceptable, this is probably the best footwear choice you could make!

Doing more barefoot stuff (like warm ups and deadlift) in our training is another way to go as it will reestablish proprioception in our feet.

If you’re interested to learn more from Eric Cressey, I would suggest you check out his website and sign up for his FREE newsletter!

It’s pretty obvious why taking care of your shoulders when you train is important.  It is one of the most injured joint in the  body, or at least one of the joints people often have some kind of issue with.  Let’s face it, who many people you know that play sports (especially baseball, tennis and basketball) or have been training consistently for a couple of years that has never had some sort of shoulder pain?

There is a more than just a couple of things you can do to help prevent shoulder injuries.  Scapular stability, thoracic spine mobility, soft-tissue work on key muscles, gleno-humeral range of motion and rotator cuff strength are just a couple of examples of what needs to be adressed for optimal shoulder performance. 

Let’s take a closer look at the last one: rotator cuff strength.  What’s the rotator cuff exactly? It’s a group of 4 muscles that include the infraspinatus, the supraspinatus, the teres minor and the subscapularis.

I’ve outlined in a post on Endeavor’s blog a couple of months ago that there is more than one way to train the rotator cuff, other than doing endless reps of external rotation.  If you haven’t read it, you check it out HERE.  Another problem we encounter when doing tons of external rotations is that we leave out a big player: the subscapularis.  The subscapularis is the only one of the rotator cuff muscles to perform internal rotation.   That can cause a problem since the other 2 major muscles that create internal rotation at the humerus are not part of rotator cuff; these 2 muscles being the pec major and the latissimus dorsi.  Here is why that is a problem:

If you take a closer look at the insertions of these 2 muscles, you’ll see that they do not attach directly on the humeral head, but rather a little lower on the humerus.  So what happens at the gleno-humeral joint if the subscapularis doesn’t have appropriate strength when internal rotation happens at the shoulder?  The pec major and latissimus dorsi are going to do all the work, and since they don’t attach directly on the humeral head, they can’t stabilize it.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, internal rotation plus unstable humeral head equals not very good.

The best way to train the subscapularis is when the humerus is abducted 90 degrees; that way, there are less chances that the pec major or lat will take over.

Here is one of my favorite ways to strengthen the rotator cuff:

As you lay on your back on the ground your elbow is going to be stabilized more easily and that way you’re going to make sure you don’t compensate with other muscles.  You want to make sure that your arm and your elbow are both at a 90 degrees angle and that your shoulder is pulled back against the ground the whole time.

Try to always include subscapularis work in your programs for optimal shoulder health and performance, especially for athletes in sports where the shoulders take a beating like baseball, tennis, basketball, hockey and football just to name a few.