Barbell positioning and shoulder flexibility

[arthur01]

Coach Rip,

I watched your video on barbell placement, and the reason people get tendonitis from it. I tried searching the board, but the majority of threads are about people who have dislocated their shoulders.

I would like to know what would you recommend doing to improve shoulder flexibility. I already do shoulder dislocations with a broomstick, and I will try to find a good masseuse to massage my shoulders.

Besides shoulder dislocations with a broomstick, what else can I do on my own to improve flexibility?

Thanks!

[alo]

I have the same problem. I've never dislocated my shoulder, but I've been doing the hands-on-keyboard pose 6-8 hours a day for the last 10 years. So, my shoulder flexibility is garbage.

What I do is work it into my warmup routine for the squat:

2 sets of 4-8 shoulder dislocates. My gym has a long wooden staff for these, but a broomstick works fine.
3 sets of 5 squats with just the bar in high-bar position, pinky finger on the marker, but concentrate on pushing the elbows back.
By this point I'm just about warmed up enough to get halfway to low-bar position.
1 set of low weight, maybe 10s, in this halfway to low-bar position.
At this point, I can usually get into proper low-bar position.

This usually sorts me out.

Prior to this, I was only doing high-bar because I couldn't get my shoulders to cooperate. After a week or two of high-bar, I noticed that by the time I got to my work sets, my shoulders were loose enough to get the bar situated properly, so I switched to this routine. I've been doing this for almost 2 weeks now, so I'm hoping in another few weeks I'll be able to go straight to low-bar.

[osv2]

3 sets of 5 squats with just the bar in high-bar position, pinky finger on the marker

Is the "marker" as on the standard Oly bar? If so, didn't you try low-bar, but with thumb on the marker instead? Then next set with index finger on the marker, and so on till your final position (pinky on the marker)? This way you'd get to the right position just in time for your work-sets.

BTW, my current working width is ring finger on the marker, pinky-on-marker is still painfully tight.