Anti-Shoulder Pain Protocol

written by JOSH GESSNER | The Athletter

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Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is today’s edition of TheAthletter, exploring stories, ideas, and frameworks to be the best athlete you can be —and how you can apply them to your career.

Today, we’re exploring my Anti-Shoulder Pain Protocol.

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What you’ll learn:

Anti-Shoulder Pain Protocol

How you can apply this to your own career

P.S. Send me feedback on how I can improve. I want to be worthy of your time. I respond to every email.

The MOST common question I get:

How do you get rid of shoulder pain as a Baseball Player?

After talking to world-leading experts and experimenting with training methods...

Here's my favorite shoulder protocol I’m using:

The Shoulder Protocol, broken into 3 parts:

1) Structural Balance

2) Progressive Overload

3) Implementation

1) Throughout my baseball career I struggled with shoulder pain.

At first, I thought it was overuse and part of being a throwing athlete.

But when I stepped back, I realized a bigger issue...

I was putting the front of my shoulder through explosive movements daily.

And the back of my shoulder - the decelerators, were getting beat up.

This wouldn't be an issue if these decelerators were strong enough to handle all that force.

But the reality - I never trained the back of my shoulder...

And you probably haven't either.

And no, I'm not talking about banded arm care exercises.

Yes they can be good for blood flow...

But they don't allow you to progressively increase strength.

So what happens is you end up developing the internal rotators...

While the external rotators are underdeveloped in comparison.

You're building an engine with weak brakes.

By strengthening the back of the shoulder, you build more resilient shoulders.

But in addition to the resilience, it can lead to a performance increase through structural balance...

Structural balance is when both sides of the body is equally as strong.

When this happens, the joint is able to move better with less efficiencies.

The stronger your decelerators, the more you can safely build your accelerators.

2) Throughout my career I would do banded exercises...

But never progressively overloaded the exercises for the back of my shoulder.

As a result, they never got stronger, and continued to develop imbalances.

What I do now is treat the exercises for the back of the shoulder just like any other exercise...

And progressively overload the weight I'm able to lift.

For some of these exercises I do heavy sets of 5.

This builds the back of the shoulder to be strong enough to handle all the force from the throw.

It's important to note that this would be more for offseason training.

I wouldn't start this in-season.

3) So how do you implement this?

On upper body days, start incorporating exercises for the back of the shoulder.

And start prioritizing them.

Here are my favorite 3:

DB External Rotation:

Side Lying DB Raise:

Trap 3 raise:

Main Lesson:

If you're struggling with shoulder pain, start incorporating some of these exercises.

3 sets of 5-8, twice a week.

You might find that building the back of your shoulder helps your shoulder pain...

Just like this athlete.

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