The most frustrating question I encounter when treating a outpatient with frosty shoulder is apathy. When the outpatient arrives for their first therapy session they are regularly in desperation mode because of the sleepless nights they have encountered over the past 6 months due to shoulder stiffness and pain. They are willing to do just about whatever short of cutting off their arm to get rid of the pain and return function... At least that's what they say to my face during this all important first visit. "What's the best frosty shoulder exercise?" is regularly one of the first questions I get, and the patient's apathetic expressions begins when I begin explaining that frosty shoulder rehabilitation consists of a compound of exercise and rest, performed in many but brief sessions throughout the day. "Do you think going to a chiropractor would help me more?" has been someone else demand on more than one occasion. "Not necessarily, sir" is the reply followed by "their are many techniques to treating your stiff shoulder, most of which are pretty good, but the important thing is that you are somewhere taking action".
Now I'm not trying to sound like a "self-help" guru, but taking daily action is the absolute crucial first step man with frosty shoulder can do to help speed recovery. Despite popular belief, just resting the shoulder only makes it more stiff and painful when you have to move it.
Now the next most important step is to avoid manufacture it worse. Now as I just wrote the former line, I can roughly here the sarcasm laden reply of thousands of web surfers as they say "ya think?" any way this is not as obviously straightforward as it seems. You see, in the world of injuries and recovery, my wife is known as a "tester". If she happens to have an injury such as a painful shoulder, neck, etc... Then everyday, no, some times a day she "tests" that injury to see if it still hurts. For instance if reaching overhead pinches or hurts her shoulder, she will repeat this movement throughout the day to see if "it's getting any better". The point of all of this is to emphasize that if you happen to be a type "A" personality, then bulling your way through the day using your painful shoulder is not the answer.
This is not to say that you will not feel pain throughout the day during definite frosty shoulder exercise, because you surely will. The important conception here is to realize the distinction in the middle of "damaging" pain and "non-damaging" pain. Now I can go into a whole section on the distinction in the middle of the two (which is out of the scope of this article), but basically "damaging" pain is pain you feel when, obviously, damage is being done to soft tissue, ligament, or bone. Damaging pain is often described with words such as "sharp", "tearing", "nerve pain", and "shooting". Most habitancy automatically stop when encountering damaging pain (although some low-pain-threshold habitancy will push through damaging pain).
By contrast, non-damaging pain is is pain felt due to shortened muscles, ligaments, soft tissue, connective tissue, or tendons and is often described with words such as "achy", "dull", "pulling", and "pressure". positively there are many more words to describe these two types of pain, but these are the ones I have encountered over thousands of outpatient visits over the years. The point of all of this is that if you do exercise and do not push through non-damaging pain with frosty shoulder exercise, you Will Not heighten your chances of recovery. A trained corporeal therapist can help give you the best compound of frosty shoulder exercise to maximize your recovery.
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