Hanging In There
Just hanging around.
Last time I talked about how I keep injuring my right shoulder, and that I’d found a way to alleviate the pain without surgery. Most of last year I was in varying degrees of pain in the shoulder, which I re-injured by sleeping on it. Lorraine was able to alleviate some of the pain with PT. Then I got a figure-eight brace to wear while sleeping and that helped me to not re-aggravate it at night. I’d get better for a while, then it would flare back up. Mainly because I was working out a lot.
I visited Lori Gordon, another PT on Lorraine’s recommendation. Lori specializes in sports rehab and gave me some exercises that helped for a while.
Finally I went to a sports medicine doctor, Dr. Hilts. He did an ultrasound that didn’t tell us much, and gave me a shot of cortisone. That helped for a bit, and reduced the pain down from a 6 to a 3, but what it really told me was that there was something worse than swelling going on. We did an MRI, and that showed a small tear. So now we knew what the problem was, and it was time for options. My hope was that I’d be able to play at Nationals and the timeline would have been about right for surgery and recovery if that’s the route we took.
It was right around this time that I spoke with my friend Andy Brewer and he mentioned a book he’d heard about that touted hanging as a solution to shoulder problems. I thought I’d give that a try before surgery. I had some gymnastics rings hanging from a tree out front that I was using for pull-ups. We ordered the book, but I found some videos with the technique and started right away.
In short, this Dr. Kirsch did several studies where he had people with various shoulder injuries hang for several minutes a day. And a vast majority of them were “cured”. Hanging feels great, anyway, so taking five to seven minutes a day to do it was pretty easy. I’d do 30 seconds hanging, then rest for 30 seconds, and do it again for five to seven times.
And it worked. Within the first week my pain decreased and within two weeks I could use my shoulder with zero pain. The book also outlines some light weight exercises to do in conjunction with the hanging. In all, it took less than ten minutes a day.
I kept at it for several weeks, then started scaling back. Now I just do it twice a week or so for maintenance and my shoulder is as good as it’s been in years.
The book itself is incredibly technical - it reads like a doctor wrote it for a medical journal. I skimmed most of it, and just focused on the exercise portions. It seems apparent to me that it was written to help people, not to make money.
If you have shoulder problems, you could do worse than to check out this book.
