On rotator cuffs and presses

Just a quick anecdote below, but to summarize: Overhead pressing worked wonders for my rotator cuff injury.

Several months ago I was hit by a car that blew a stop sign while biking, and the next morning I realized my left rotator cuff (and to a lesser degree my right knee) had been hurt. I had a terrible time rotating the left arm, and could not even get it into high bar position for squats without a lot of pain, low bar being nearly impossible. I just had to front squat for a couple weeks, no big deal there.

I saw a doctor who said something along the lines of it being almost definitely a tear and that I should see a physio etc. Having graded papers for many pre-physio undergrads that wander into anthropology classes, I did not have much faith in any rehab program they would've offereed.

So I took a gander in my copy of SS:BBT, talked to some of my anatomist friends and decided that I would just keep overhead pressing. And I did. I deloaded maybe more than was necessary, and for a while it did hurt at lockout, but I kept at it. Its been a while now so I dont remember exactly how long this process took, but looking back through my notebooks it looks like after a two weeks I stopped having consistent pains and could return to back squats and bench presses with almost no pain. After a month and a half (ish) I stopped having the occasional pains from reaching for something behind me or whatever, and have had absolutely no recurrence of the pain since. If its relevant my work sets are now a bit over 80% of my bodyweight.

So there you go- presses fixed my rotator cuff. I had completely forgotten about it until I had read the new T-Nation article, so I thought id share. Its probably been said a thousand times already, but more data points is always better.