Brenda Nolen

Well, I think I have to accept that my shoulder issues are not going to go away on their own.  As I mentioned before, this week’s second weight training session went fine, with normal muscular pain which morphed into tendon pain in my right shoulder, then (since my left shoulder felt left out) the pain switched to my left shoulder and is still there.  I’ve known for a while that it was tendonitis but thought that if I just went easy with my range of motion (don’t do anything heavy over my head, basically) that it would improve over time.  I was wrong, so now I have to do something about it if I ever want to gain the strength I envision.

Disclaimer: This doesn’t surprise me, though it does irritate me.  I am, after all, 45 years old and have pretty much lived in front of a computer since I purchased my first one in 1998 (well, before that, when I would do whatever I could to learn about them.  Heck, I learned typing on the first incarnation of a Macintosh computer).

So, now, I’m sitting here, with my horrible desk posture, trying to figure out how to fix this NOW (I wish it could be that quick).  Before today’s workout, I did this stretch.  Now, I didn’t have the stool setup so I just leaned over the arm of the couch (the bungee cords were in the garage, where my weights are).  They all just about killed my shoulder!  I lifted my arms above my head as far as I could without excruciating pain.  So, I’ll either hold off on doing this or just NOT raise my arms so high.

I’m going to do these every day (they suggest two times a day to start with).  These are the best stretches I’ve seen for shoulder pain yet (and I’ve been looking off and on for about 4 months).

I’m not sure if I’ll wait to add this (depends on how I deal with these stretches) or do these in conjunction with the stretches.  These are basic exercises to correct posture.  The way I’m looking at my shoulder pain is that my entire upper body is the problem, not just the shoulders.

And then I’m going to throw this one in, since bad posture includes my neck.

Since I was able to get my entire weight training in today, I know I didn’t do anything to aggravate my shoulder (good thing) so I SHOULD be able to continue working out while doing all these stretches/exercises too.