The most frustrating question I encounter when treating a patient with icy shoulder is apathy. When the patient 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 anyone 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 leading first visit. "What's the best icy shoulder exercise?" is regularly one of the first questions I get, and the patient's apathetic expressions begins when I begin explaining that icy shoulder treatment consists of a combination of practice and rest, performed in manifold but brief sessions throughout the day. "Do you think going to a chiropractor would help me more?" has been another inquire 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 leading thing is that you are somewhere taking action".
Now I'm not trying to sound like a "self-help" guru, but taking daily performance is the absolute crucial first step someone with icy 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 leading step is to avoid production it worse. Now as I just wrote the old line, I can almost here the sarcasm laden reply of thousands of web surfers as they say "ya think?" any way this is not as obviously simple 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, any 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 exact icy shoulder exercise, because you absolutely will. The leading idea here is to comprehend the discrepancy between "damaging" pain and "non-damaging" pain. Now I can go into a whole section on the discrepancy between 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 population automatically stop when encountering damaging pain (although some low-pain-threshold population 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". in effect there are many more words to enumerate these two types of pain, but these are the ones I have encountered over thousands of patient visits over the years. The point of all of this is that if you do practice and do not push through non-damaging pain with icy shoulder exercise, you Will Not heighten your chances of recovery. A trained bodily therapist can help give you the best combination of icy shoulder practice to maximize your recovery.
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