A lot of shoulder pain gets noticed in the middle of something ordinary. You reach into the back seat for your bag and feel a sharp catch. Or you go to serve in pickleball and an ache shoots down the outside of your arm. Some people notice it at night, when rolling onto that side wakes them up. Most of the time, the rotator cuff is behind it.
What the Rotator Cuff Does
It’s a group of four small muscles and their tendons wrapped around the top of your arm bone. They keep the ball of the shoulder centered in its socket while the bigger muscles do the lifting. Tossing a ball, doing laps, and sliding a box onto the top shelf of the garage all run through these muscles. For how hard they work, they aren’t very big, and that’s part of why they get worn out.
What Goes Wrong
Here’s what we usually find when we look closer:
- Tendinitis from doing the same motion too many times
- Impingement, which is when the tendon gets squeezed under the top of the shoulder as your arm goes up
- A partial tear from years of wear
- A full tear, which sometimes happens after a fall or a hard pull
Swimmers, pitchers, tennis players, and people who work with their arms overhead see it a lot. So do people in their 50s and 60s who never played a sport at all, since tendons get a bit weaker with age.
Signs to Watch For
Most people point to the outside of the upper arm, a few inches down from the top of the shoulder. Lifting the arm out to the side hurts, and so does reaching back to tuck in a shirt. Sleeping on that side is often miserable. Some people notice weakness too, like having trouble holding a gallon of milk out in front of them.
How Sports Medicine Helps
We start with a hands-on exam. We’ll test each of the four muscles, check how far your arm moves, and watch how your shoulder blade moves when you lift. That shoulder blade part matters more than most people think. Imaging comes in if we suspect a bigger tear.
Physical therapy fixes most of these. The first couple of weeks are about getting the pain down and getting the arm moving again. After that come resistance bands and light dumbbells, for the cuff and for the muscles that steady your shoulder blade. If you play a sport, we’ll bring you back to it in steps, so you’re not going from nothing to a full game of tennis in one day.
Sometimes the pain is bad enough that the exercises are hard to do, and a shot can take the edge off. We only talk about surgery for big tears, or if you’ve put in months of real work and the shoulder still isn’t better.
Is your shoulder giving you trouble at the pool, on the court, or every time you grab something off a high shelf? Stop by Modern Medicine of Chandler, AZ and we’ll take a look. We’ll sort out which part of the rotator cuff is unhappy and get you started on fixing it.
