Shoulder Stabilization & Dysfunction - Part II

Kia Ora from New Zealand, mates! The Chinaman's once again hit the ground swinging, teaching Combat Shuai-Chiao on the first night and Functional Movement Systems repatterning & Hard Style Kettlebell Essentials on the second night.

As many of you know, my passion in kettlebell training & teaching revolves around using kettlebells as rehabilitation tools. Over the past 2 nights of teaching, I've had the chance to convey to my Kiwi audience that proper functional movement patterns are essential for REAL performance. While people often tend to dismiss movement fundamentals as necessary for those who have the inability to perform exercises. However, the strongest are sometimes the most injured, as they compensate their way through the tasks at hand.

Back to the shoulder...

In my last post, I talked about some of the signs & symptoms of shoulder pattern dysfunction. But let's talk a little more about WHERE these problems originate. The next post will talk about HOW those problems come about from a pathophysiological perspective. [I'd write on it all right now, but I've still gotta shower up and get ready to roll around Auckland & do touristy stuff within 30 mins.]

Dysfunctional movement patterns can happen all sorts of ways. When it comes to the shoulder, these patterns can be learned or developed through:

1. Observation & mimicry - seeing someone else do a movement and learning to reproduce their dysfunctional pattern or mimicking someone else's proper movement pattern improperly

2. Pain inhibition - pain at the site of movement (usually from some sort of injury) creates a pain inhibition situation, where the motor neurons that guide muscle firing patterns are being overruled by pain signals arising from injury

3. Secondary compensation - pain or limitation in range of motion somewhere else in the system creates a compensation pattern in an otherwise unaffected joint.

OK... crap, I'm running later than I thought. I'll expand on each of those 3 concepts in my next posts. If you're enjoying this series of posts on the shoulder, please feel free to either drop a comment here on the blog or shoot me an e-mail. For those of you who've already e-mailed me with such appreciative comments, I thank you too. You're the reason why I do what I do and the reason why I continue to love what I do!