Shoulder Subluxation and time off

[mrRed]

Every 2 years or so I managed to sublux (partial dislocation) my shoulder. I was doing shoulder dislocates after a workout on Monday night and managed to have an episode.

Took about 5 minutes of sitting in a contorted position on the ground until, with the help of a little ice and some concentrating on breathing and relaxing the joint, and the shoulder went back in.

Went to my orthopedist yesterday, labrum still feels tight (had a Bony Bankhart repair about 7 years ago), bones are in their right position, and everything seems good.

He basically said to take it a little easy getting back into things and to focus two weeks on doing rehab exercises for the rotator cuff for the next short while until the pain subsides (still hurts now, 2 days later).

Anyway, my question is for people who've gone through this before, is other than the standard interior / exterior band rotation and dumbell raises (arms about 45 deg. angle to front, raise to parallel with the ground), is there anything you'd recommend to help strengthen the rotator cuff a bit?

[Dastardly]

I cycled through this a few times last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0ONHZmsFec

A good large mix of exercises for shoulder recovery. Its better to have a lot of exercises, as it helps you keep a light weight and focus on a large amount of solid reps. If you only do one or two exercises, you get stagnant and feel tempted to add weight, which results on straining which does not allow recovery.

Similar to the starr protocol, its all about lots of reps everyday for a week or two. Bear in mind a shoulder problem may be a capsular injury, cartilage type tissue takes a very long time to recover if at all.

From my experience (as detailed in the shoulder surgery thread) these problems do not really get much better if you have some inherent looseness in the capsule.

After you feel recovered from the trauma of this subluxation pressing as normal is probably the best shoulder exercise to do. But I have found it is good to sometimes do exercises where the traps are reomoved from the equation.

When my shoulder is unstable/impinges, the traps always take over, so the end ROM of my glenohumeral joint remains unworked. I feel it as a positive effect to try and work this full ROM, without using the traps. Do what feels right I guess..

[mrRed]

Thanks. I'm a little wary of some of the movements in that routine as they're the ones that can pop my shoulder out, but I'll try to incorporate a lot of it into my next two weeks of recovery work. I'm going to try and keep incorporating the work into my training as well to see if I can lessen the chance of this happening again.