Shoulder Pain Reaching Across Body

What Causes Shoulder Pain Reaching Across Body?

Wonder why your shoulder hurts when reaching across your body?

Shoulder pain reaching across your body is usually caused by impingement - meaning pinching or rubbing of a tendon in the shoulder.  The specific injuries involved may be:

• Rotator cuff tendonitis
• Rotator cuff tear
• Biceps tedontitis

What Causes These Tendons To Get Pinched?

Reaching across body is commonly difficult for people who have shoulder pain due to stiffness in the back part of the shoulder joint.

When you have stiffness in the back of your shoulder, it causes the ball to glide forward in the socket when you reach across your body.

Why Does That Cause Shoulder Pain?

Well, picture your shoulder joint like a golf ball sitting on a golf tee (except the tee is turned sideways).

Now imagine that your arm is attached to the golf ball.

When the ball is centered in the middle of the tee, your arm will move pretty smoothly.

However, if the ball gets off center, then it can start to pinch on the edge of the tee.

That's sort of what happen when you reach across your body.

The ball of the shoulder glides forward in the socket and you pinch on the front end of the tee.

Additionally, there's a little hook of bone on the front of the shoulder blade call te the coracoid process.

Three muscles attach to the coracoid process:

• your pectoralis minor muscle
• the short head of your biceps
• the coracobrachialis

If the ball of your shoulder is too far forward in the socket, you can also start to pinch the tendons that attach to the coracoid process.

How Do You Stop Shoulder Pain Reaching Across Body?

Here are two tips to keep you shoulder from hurting when reaching acrosss your body:

1. Keep the ball centered in the socket

In order to be able to reach across your body without pain, you need to be able to keep the ball of the shoulder centered in the socket.

As you reach across your body, the ball of the shoulder rolls forward.  In order for it to be able to stay centered in the socket, it needs to glide backward at the same time.

If the rotator cuff muscles and joint capsule in the back of the shoulder are too stiff, then the ball won't be able to glide backward.

So how do you keep the back of your shoulder from getting too stiff?

The main two ways to stretch the back of your shoulder are to reach across your body (horizontal adduction), or reach behind your back (internal rotation).

Cross Body Shoulder Stretch

The problem with the first method is that if you're already having shoulder pain reaching across your body, then doing this as an exercise doesn't make sense.

You're more likely to further irritate the problem unless you limit how far across your body that you reach.

One technique shown in the video is to block the ball of your shoulder with your opposite hand while you reach across your body in order to prevent the ball from gliding forward in the socket.

Another option is to lean up against a wall as shown in this video.