If you are suffering from shoulder pain, then I feel for you. Towarsd the end of last year I tore my rotator cuff. If you know what this is either you are a doctor, physiotherapist or you have already damaged yoru own rotator cuff. Around one third of people will get a shoulder injury at some point and the vast majority are rotator cuff problems.

Like most of us,I did not give much thought to how my shoulders worked until I damaged one of them. Since then I have learnt so much that I could write a book on the subject.

Shoulder pain can really get you down. It is only when you damage a shoulder that you realise just how much you rely on your shoulders. After all, your arms hang from them and you use your arms all the time without giving them a second thought and nearly every arm movement is relayed to your shoulder to some extent.

So it comes as no surprise that shoulder pain can cause so much trouble. There are several causes of shoulder pain. Here are a few.

Like me, it could be a rotator cuff problem. The rotator cuff is a group of muscles that all help to hold the head of the humerus into the shoulder. Tear one of them and you have constant shoulder pain whenever you try lifting your arm above shoulder height.

Bursitis of the shoulder can be just as painful. The bursa is a sac of fluid that helps to protect the soft tissue of the shoulder and prevent them rubbing as it moves. It can become inflamed in which case you will experience pain with nearly every movement.

Frozen shoulder on the other hand is caused by the internal membrane that surrounds the shoulder joint. This can become inflamed following an injury, scar tissue can grow and the shoulder can become painful and have severely restricted movement.

Alright, enough of the doom and gloom.

I had suffered from shoulder pain for six months, I was told that I needed surgery to sort out my rotator cuff problem and so I started researching shoulder injuries and pain and discovered that a lot of them can be fixed with simpel exercise. Even whenyou require surgery, exercise will feature strongly in the recovery process.

So having found out that exercise is so important the next thing was to find out what exercise suited me best. I did not want to try any weights simply because I am not a member of a gym and I could not see how lifting weights was going to do anything but harm. My research has since confirmed this.

I started looking into Yoga and Pilates. These came across as gentle exercises that allow you to do as much as you comfortably can. They focus on flexibility and control as well as strength and use the bodies own resistance to build up weakened muscles. Because you are working within your own natural limits there was little chance of doing extra damage.

Having suffered six months of pain I was reluctant to risk doing any further damage so this side of Pilates appealed to me.

Over the next few weeks, I gradually built up my exercises starting off with stretching exercises to regain the flexibility after months of restricted movement, moving onto exercises to give control and stabilise the joint and finally moved on to strengthening exercises to build up the muscles and protect me from future problems. I found myself back to full pain free movement in my shoulder within a couple of months.

Pilates focuses on balance within the body. Shoulder problems tend to be the domain of the athletes and anyone over forty. As we age, some muscles start to get lazy, we change our posture, carry ourselves differently. Exercising gradually wakes up the last muscles and puts our bodies back in balance.

I know that makes me sound like an aging hippy but who cares as long as there is no more shoulder pain.

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