[butterworthtom]

Hello,

My girlfriend is relatively new to climbing, having been doing it for approximately 1.5 years. She has been pretty committed and become fairly strong quite quickly. She has had some minor shoulder and elbow problems from climbing in the past.

Recently she has complained of her back feeling uncomfortable constantly, and today she showed me that one of her shoulder blades sticks out significantly compared with the other. When I pushed/ pulled it back into a place comparable with the other shoulder blade, she said it felt a lot better. The part that protudes is on her right side, to the lower inside of her shoulder blade.

Any ideas what is going on? What can be done to restore her shoulders to normal?

16130041_10154029951812136_431538840_o by Tom Butterworth, on Flickr

[SA Chris]

You can get all sorts of of instabilities and misalignment in shoulders that feel normal if they are there for long enough but aren't, usually due to doing things more on one side like driving, mouse clicking etc. My physio pointed out I hunch one shoulder slightly and figured out it was due to me often carrying a backpack or camera bag on the same shoulder.

Go see a decent physio, and they can usually a) get it back in place and b) recommend exercises or regimes to prevent it from happening again.

[erm, sam]

A key thing is what happens when the arms are active. When I last saw a physio he said, "woah your scapula position is terrible" as I stood there, but when I raised my arms he said "oh, it is not so bad/better when you are actually doing something".

There is a recent thread on shoulder positioning that has lots of stuff that are good for scapula positional muscles.

[Oldmanmatt]

All true. But she's in discomfort and that is never good, especially at rest!
Off to the Quack with you, young lady!


All posts either sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek or mildly mocking-in-a-friendly-way unless otherwise stated. I always forget to put those smiley things...

[Tommy]

Some of you might enjoy as there's quite a bit of info and nicely explained.

[bigironhorse]

I have something similar which I have self-diagnosed as being due to an imbalance in muscles of the chest and back. I have found these exercises for rhomboid rehab to be quite useful for reducing pain and correcting shoulder blade posture:



Whilst it feels good and quite intuitive I have found stretching the back muscles (like hunching, dropping shoulders and twisting) to be counter-prouctive. Some of the shoulder exercises in Dave McLeod's book also seem to help.

If you're going to see a professional I think physio is a better option than chiro for this kind of back problem.

[duncan]

Recently she has complained of her back feeling uncomfortable constantly, ...

Worth having this checked by a GP to make sure it is a musculoskeletal problem.

Regarding the shoulder blade winging, bigironhorse's top line of 3 exercises are most likely to help, plus something for serratus anterior (e.g. side planks). No guarantee they will help with an aching mid-back, some causation needs to be established, but they  might and are all generically useful for the typical climber's posture.  Her Rhomboids look well developed already, often the case with slightly winging angle of scapula, so I wouldn't do too much scapular retraction (second line of exercises).

[duncan]

Some of you might enjoy as there's quite a bit of info and nicely explained.

This is good. The open chain (kettle-ball) exercises he demonstrates should be substituted with closed chain ones like planks and press-ups because we're climbers not tennis players.