3 Exercises to do EVERY DAY for Healthy Shoulders

These are 3 low intense shoulder exercises you can do every day to keep your shoulders strong, mobile, and healthy.

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We refer to these as our shoulders & sometimes we run into some dysfunction there. They’re not moving properly or we get some pain in the shoulder neck area & a lot of the time what this comes from is not being able to control your shoulder blades.

These two have to work in conjunction for you to have freedom of movement at the shoulder joint. These 3 exercises are going to target the shoulder blade & the shoulder to work in conjunction with each other to gain a little bit more awareness of those shoulder blades & to strengthen the appropriate muscles.

Exercise 1 - Scapular Push-up

We’re going to start on our knees & we're going to be working the shoulder blades through protraction & retraction. When you get down into quadruped position you want your hands right underneath your shoulders. We are going to lock the elbows out, you don't want to get soft in the elbow & bend here. Lock this out push the ground away moving the shoulder blade to the side of my rib cage. This is called protraction. We're really forcing ourselves into this position. You should be feeling serratus anterior work.

You should also feel some of these other core muscles kick on if you're doing this correctly. From here keeping those elbows locked out we want to come back into retraction. Push away & retract. We're just getting this movement & our shoulder blades. A common mistake we see when people are doing scapular push-ups is we extend the spine with this retraction.

This isn't yoga cat-cow, we're not extending & flexing we're keeping a neutral spine keeping tension in the stomach & we are protracting & retracting. Torso & spine are staying very neutral just getting movement from our shoulder blades. If you have trouble with scapular winging & this is challenging for you then you can check out our video about fixing scapula wing.

   • 3 Exercises You Can Do To Fix Winged Scapula  

It will show you some other helpful tools that you can do. (video) We can actually just go up onto our feet just to progress this exercise a little bit further. Protract. Retract.

Exercise 2 – Supine Pull Over
Come down on your back & get the back nice & flat to the ground we’re going to put our arms up in the air put them together, thumbs together, palms together & from here we're just going to move these arms up over our head & tap our thumbs down to the ground & bring them back up to the starting position. We’re working our shoulder through flexion, should be getting some upward rotation of the scapula really reaching forward keeping core nice & turned on. Not let the back arch & then we're using those lat muscles to pull us over here. We're going to full overhead range of motion which is very effective for keeping the shoulders moving through all these ranges of motion. Another variation that we can do is more of a Y position. Instead of coming straight this way I'm going to move my arms out & the thumbs down to the ground. This is going to be more of a supine Y which we get more efficient upward rotation of our scapula which is going to involve a little bit more of that serratus anterior muscle.

Exercise 3: Arm Circles
This is very basic & I remember doing this in Little League but it's
very effective movement to keep your shoulder & shoulder blades moving throughout all ranges of motion. Let’s start with our arms out to the side & start with some small circles moving my arms forward & we are focusing on getting those shoulders & shoulder blades moving together. Notice that my torso is staying pretty neutral. It’s just my shoulders that are moving. We don't want to see the spine moving a lot right right now, spine stays pretty neutral & the arms move freely. Don't think about moving your hands in a circle because we want the shoulder to do a lot of work.Think of it as doing circles from your shoulder. We can also go to the back just like the front & do bigger smaller. You can see what feels good & doesn't feel good. Do some really big circles & go backwards big circles. Notice that I'm going to move that on my shoulder blades. So those are 3 exercises that you can do every day to keep your shoulders healthy & they are very low intense exercises so you can do it for three sets of ten & work your way up.

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