Tips for Good Hip Health

Walking, Running, and Regular Chiropractic Care

We take a lot for granted as far as our bodies are concerned. Essentially we're given our bodies for free, and it's often hard to value and care for something we're given but didn't actually earn. Unfortunately, as many of us learn, without care our bodies will break down, possibly sooner rather than later. Entropy is a universal principle, and ongoing work is required to maintain order and function in all systems and all machines. Regular chiropractic care is an example of such ongoing work. A healthy nerve system is required for optimal functioning of all your other physiological systems including the cardiorespiratory, digestive, immune, and hormonal systems. When your nerve system isn't functioning properly, these other systems break down. Regular chiropractic care removes nerve interference, making it possible for all the other systems of your body to do their jobs. From a biomechanical perspective, balance is restored and stress points are removed, making it possible to engage in and enjoy activities such as walking and running over many years of a healthy life.

Having a pair of healthy hips is a key to healthy aging. But healthy hips are not only important for people in their 60s, 70s, and beyond. Your hips are one of your most important structural components, regardless of how old you are. Whether you're 20, 30, or 40, your hip joints provide biomechanical support to your entire body. Thus, keeping your hips healthy is a necessary consideration for everyone who wants to be healthy and well throughout a long life.
Healthy hips do not happen automatically. Your body's physiology follows the biomechanical principle of "use it or lost it". Muscles, bones, and joints that do work on a regular basis are strengthened and enhanced. Those musculoskeletal elements that don't do much physical work are broken down, so that molecular building blocks such as amino acids and nutrients such as calcium can be put to better use elsewhere. In other words, if you're haven't done much exercise in a while, weight-bearing joints such as the hips, knees, and ankles will begin to degrade. However, even as these joints lose optimal structural integrity, gravitational forces persist. The long-term result of such weakened joints is strains and sprains, degenerative arthritis, and possibly other inflammatory conditions. These disorders likely involve daily ongoing pain, which may become moderate or severe.
In the absence of conservative treatment and rehabilitative exercise, such conditions may ultimately require joint replacement. These procedures are becoming increasingly common, with total hip replacements and total knee replacements being performed on younger and younger patients. For example, annual rates for total hip replacement in the United States in patients aged 45 and older have almost doubled between 2000 and 2010.¹
Importantly, many hip joint problems can be prevented by instituting appropriate lifestyle changes. As the cause of many of these degenerative conditions is long-term lack of use, the solution lies in activity and physical work. In Western nations, physical labor is becoming increasingly uncommon. Most of us work in service-type industries and spend most of our days sitting at a desk. As a result, physical work is now typically obtained by engaging in regular, vigorous exercise. By performing five 30-minute sessions of vigorous weight-bearing exercise every week, we will restore and maintain sufficient healthy stress on our muscles, bones, and joints.
As these musculoskeletal structures undergo physical loads and perform mechanical work, your body responds by making them stronger.^2-4 New blood vessels are built to supply these structures with increasing amounts of oxygen and other nutrients. New cells are built to support existing tissues. Worn-out cells are removed more efficiently. The entire musculoskeletal system is revitalized in response to regular, vigorous exercise. The long-term result is healthy hips, knees, and ankles, as well as a healthy spine. These weight-bearing structures work synergistically to help provide you with long-term health.
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¹Hospitalization for Total Hip Replacement Among Inpatients Aged 45 and Over: United States, 2000–2010. NCHS Data Brief No. 186, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, February 2015
²Qian JG, et al: Effectiveness of Selected Fitness Exercises on Stress of Femoral Neck using Musculoskeletal Dynamics Simulations and Finite Element Model. J Hum Kinet 41:59-70, 2014
³Bolam KA, et al: The effect of physical exercise on bone density in middle-aged and older men: a systematic review. Osteoporosis Int 24(11):2749-2762, 2013
⁴Hill KD, et al: Individualized home-based exercise programs for older people to reduce falls and improve physical performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Maturitas 2015 Apr 29. doi: 10.1016/j.maturitas.2015.04.005. [Epub ahead of print]

Time's Arrow

Longevity and Regular Chiropractic Care

Regular chiropractic care is a key component of all programs promoting healthy aging. We all grow older, but those of us who grow older and retain relatively youthful levels of health and vigor are those who have incorporated specific lifestyles into their daily habits. These health-promoting lifestyles include a nutritious diet, regular moderate-to-high intensity exercise, and sufficient rest. Engaging in these healthy behaviors provides your body with the raw materials it needs to function at peak effectiveness and efficiency. Regular chiropractic care helps ensure that your nerve system, your body's master system, provides accurate instructions to the rest of your body's systems so that you make optimal use of these raw materials. The long-term result is a process of growing older based on a foundation of health and well being.

As we get older, most of us begin to experience the acceleration of the passage of time. The sensation of time passing gets faster and faster, until for many of us weeks begin to feel like days and months begin to feel like weeks. This is very disconcerting and we'd like to be able to slow things down. We'd like to make the months and years whiz by a little less quickly. This isn't possible, of course, from the point of view of time itself, and the only comfort may lie in the fact that everyone else is experiencing similar phenomena. "Time flies" is a common expression. But there are solutions, relative ones, by which we may get a better grasp on our personal relationship to time and time's effect on our physical bodies.
The first solution is associated with the concept of present time consciousness. In other words, the more you actually experience the present moment itself, the more you will be participating in what these moments offer and the more you will be getting out of the experiences of which your life is comprised. "Being present" is a skill that gets stronger with practice. There's always the tendency for our minds to wander off on any other track than the one we want to be on, that is, being present. But with practice our ability to be present in the moment expands. One of the remarkable benefits of this practice is that our experience of time passing slows down. By being present, our hours, days, and weeks become much more meaningful. We experience more of life and the passage of time no longer washes over us like an unending series of 20-foot waves.
The second solution involves taking better care of ourselves. When we're healthy and well, each day is more enjoyable. When we're healthy and well, our physical state is not a daily concern and we're free to do what we want. We can read, study, exercise, engage in new work activities, or simply relax and watch a movie without the concerns and constraints of physical pain and disease. Our ability to participate in these unique experiences enriches our lives and makes the passage of time a joy rather than a burden. But as with the skill of being present, the skill of being healthy and well requires practice. Such practice takes the form of eating a nutritious diet,^1,2 doing regular vigorous exercise,³ and getting sufficient rest. With these practices in place, we are well on our way to increasing our long-term levels of health and wellness.
Thus, although we cannot control the actual passage of time, we can control our relationship to the phenomenon of time passing. By learning the skill of present time consciousness and practicing healthy behaviors, we become able to add more life to our years and may even be adding more years to our lives.
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¹Paddon-Jones D, et al: Protein and healthy aging. Am J Clin Nutr 2015 Apr 29. pii: ajcn084061. [Epub ahead of print]
²Royston KJ, Tollefsbol TO: The Epigenetic Impact of Cruciferous Vegetables on Cancer Prevention. Curr Pharmacol Rep 1(1):46-51, 2015
³Gonzales JU: Do older adults with higher daily ambulatory activity have lower central blood pressure? Aging Clin Exp Res 2015 May 22. [Epub ahead of print]

Your Personal Cloud

Regular Chiropractic Care Supports a Healthy Brain

When we think about taking care of our bodies, we usually don't specifically consider taking care of our brains. Oddly, the brain is an afterthought. But your brain's health and welfare is critically important to your overall well-being. Regarding brain physiology, the primary concern is the status of arteries and arterioles, the blood vessels that supply your brain cells with oxygen and other nutrients. Arterioles clogged by cholesterol- and fat-containing plaque may weaken over time and eventually burst, causing varying degrees of loss of neurologic function and even death. The primary means of prevention of such arteriosclerotic disease is to engage in regular vigorous exercise and eat consistently nutritious food selected from all five food groups. Regular chiropractic care helps you get the most out your exercise program and nutritious diet. By keeping your spine aligned and your nerve system operating at full capacity, regular chiropractic care helps you achieve optimum levels of good health, including healthy brain function.

The concept of cloud computing has become a buzzword in recent years. The notion of "the cloud" originally referred to data storage. You could backup your computer files or even an image of your hard drive to a server bank in some remote location. Now you can access fully featured software programs via the cloud, including well-known productivity and photo editing programs. Cloud computing enables you to save money you would have spent on costly software packages and frees up valuable space on your home or office networks. The only drawback involves security issues, but such issues exist on your local networks as well.
The computing paradigm has taken over more and more not only of our work day, but our recreational environments as well. As a result, it has become increasingly easy to neglect and ultimately forget about the precious components of human physiology upon which all computing systems are based, that is, our very own brain and central nervous system.
There are serious downsides to such neglect and lack of care. Most of us are aware of the need to engage in regular vigorous exercise and eat a consistently nutritious diet. We do these things because we've learned the importance of a healthy lifestyle. Of course, these healthful activities support the functioning of your brain and central nervous system. But your brain requires more than mere physiological sustenance. Your brain itself requires the performance of actual work so that it can continue to do what it was designed to do.¹ The critical function of your brain is to provide you with creative, innovative solutions to the challenges you face every day to the survival and welfare of you and your family.
Your brain is staggeringly complex. It is estimated there are more connections among your brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Specifically, there are more than 100 billion neurons in your brain, with several 100 trillion (10¹⁴) and possibly as many as 1 quadrillion (10¹⁵) connections. This massive network is built for heavy lifting, but most of us now fritter away this priceless resource as we spend seemingly endless hours talking and texting on our cell phones and playing games on our phones, tablets, and laptops.
Now we may be developing eye-hand coordination when we lose an entire afternoon playing race car and other arcade-style games.^2,3 But as the great philosophers have known for almost 3000 years, actual thinking is the best and most worthwhile use we can make of the free gift of self-awareness we receive as humans. Only thinking will provide us with the tools and techniques we require to grow, develop, and thrive in our increasingly complex and shrinkingly small global village. But the skill (or art) of thinking is based on training. Fortunately such training is available everywhere and the cost is frequently only that of time. Reading books is the primary training ground for developing the skill of critical thinking that will make a difference in our lives. Reading books that challenge you, followed by study and practice, will hone and refine your ability to actually think and make use of your brain, your own personal cloud. Surprisingly, and possibly shockingly, everything we need for such life-enhancing thinking is available right there "within" us.

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¹Vigliecca NS, Baez S: Screening executive function and global cognition with the Nine-Card Sorting Test: healthy participant studies and ageing implications. Psychogeriatrics 2015 Mar 3. doi: 10.1111/psyg.12104. [Epub ahead of print]
²Moisala M, et al: Brain activity during divided and selective attention to auditory and visual sentence comprehension tasks. Front Hum Neurosci 2015 Feb 19;9:86. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00086
³Banerjee S, et al: Interests shape how adolescents pay attention: the interaction of motivation and top-down attentional processes in biasing sensory activations to anticipated events. Eur J Neurosci 41(6):818-834, 2015

One, Two, or Three Miles?

Regular Chiropractic Care and Injury Prevention

Cardiovascular exercise such as walking, running, biking, and swimming is a necessary component of all exercise programs. But as with all forms of exercise, the possibility for injury exists and must be accounted for. Hamstring, quadriceps, and calf muscle strains are common examples of cardiovascular exercise-related injuries. Low back muscles and ligaments may be injured as well. A complete training program is one that minimizes the likelihood of injury and is supported by regular chiropractic care. Exercise-related injuries are often the result of faulty biomechanics. Such imbalances put excessive loads on one side of your body versus the other side. As time goes on the overworked side will begin to fail, and injury to the low back or one of the large muscle groups of the leg will occur. Regular chiropractic care detects and corrects spinal misalignments, the primary source of faulty biomechanics. By helping restore and maintain optimal functioning of your spine, regular chiropractic care helps you avoid painful injuries and setbacks in your training program. The result is improved fitness, health, and long-term well-being.

Even experienced exercisers sometimes find it difficult to know how much to do. For the beginner this uncertainty represents a significant stumbling block. Fortunately well-established guidelines and protocols exist to provide assistance to all exercisers, regardless of your skill level.

 In general, the beginning exerciser requires the most instruction. The key is to build up strength and endurance slowly and not do too much too soon. In terms of strength training, the best plan is to determine at what weight you can comfortably perform three sets of eight repetitions. If you can't do three sets of eight reps at the weight you've selected, it's too heavy. If doing three sets of eight reps with the weight you've chosen doesn't feel like anything at all, then the weight is too light. Overall, of course, too light is better than too heavy. The majority of strength training injuries occur when you're attempting to train with an inappropriately heavy weight.

 For example, you've selected 15-pound dumbbells with which to perform your bench press routine. You can comfortably do three sets of eight reps. Fifteen pounds is not too light and not too heavy. During the course of your next several weight training sessions, build up to three sets of 12 reps using the 15-pound dumbbells. When you can do three sets of 12 reps successfully, the next time you do your bench press routine you'll increase the weight by approximately 10%. In other words, you'll use the next heaviest weight, which is usually 17.5 pounds in a well-equipped gym. Begin with three sets of eight reps with the 17.5-pound dumbbells, and progress over the next several sessions to three sets of 12 reps. Then you'll repeat the sequence with 20-pound dumbbells, starting at three sets of eight reps and building up to three sets of 12 reps. You'll follow this formula with all of your strength training exercises. In this way, using a safe, smart, and graduated program, you'll consistently build lean muscle mass, gain improved strength and efficiency of your cardiovascular system, and most likely lose several pounds as stored fat is converted to muscle.¹

The same principles apply to cardiovascular exercises such as walking, running, biking, and swimming. If you haven't exercised in a very long time, walking is a good method with which to begin.^2,3 On your first day, go for a normally paced 10- or 15-minute walk. Don't be concerned that your walk feels like it's over only a few minutes after it's begun. Your main focus should be on getting started, not on how much or how little you're doing in the first few sessions. Over the course of four to six weeks, build up a minute or two each session until you're able to comfortably walk for 30 minutes at a moderate pace. At this point you can begin to increase your pace gradually, building up to a 30- or 40-minute walk at a brisk pace. At this level, you're going a very good, vigorous cardiovascular workout and your heart, lungs, and other components of your cardiorespiratory system are becoming stronger, healthier, and more efficient.
In this gradual, steady, measured way, all exercisers, of whatever age, prior experience, and skill level, can gain a lifetime of benefit from their fitness programs and minimize the likelihood of setbacks or injury.
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¹Hawkins M, et al: Impact of an exercise intervention on physical activity during pregnancy: the behaviors affecting baby and you study. Am J Public Health 2014 Oct;104(10):e74-81. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2014.302072. Epub 2014 Aug 14
²Hanson S, Jones A: Is there evidence that walking groups have health benefits? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Sports Med 2015 Jan 19. pii: bjsports-2014-094157. doi: 10.1136/bjsports-2014-094157. [Epub ahead of print]
³Varma VR, et al: Low-intensity daily walking activity is associated with hippocampal volume in older adults. Hippocampus 2014 Dec 7. doi: 10.1002/hipo.22397. [Epub ahead of print]

20/20 Vision

Regular Chiropractic Care Supports Your Goals of Health and Wellness

When you set your sights on the goal of achieving fitness and good health, it's important to be sure your plan of action is complete. You'll establish measurable goals for three of the main pillars of good health, that is, regular exercise, a nutritious diet, and sufficient rest. In addition, a complete action plan for achieving a healthy lifestyle that lasts includes regular chiropractic care. Regular chiropractic care helps ensure that the time you're spending on obtaining a healthy diet and regular, vigorous exercise is put to good use. In order to derive maximum benefit from the good food you're eating and the cardiovascular exercise and weight-training you're doing, your nerve system, your body's master system, must be functioning at peak efficiency. By detecting and correcting misalignments of the spine, regular chiropractic care helps restore and maintain a free flow of information from your brain to your body and from your body to your brain. By removing nerve interference, regular chiropractic care enables your nerve system to do its job. The result is optimum benefit from your lifestyle activities and greater levels of health and wellness.

All of us have thought, at one point or another, and possibly more than once, "I wish I knew then what I know now." It's been famously said that "hindsight is 20/20". Our clarity of thought with respect to what we should have done is frequently much more acute than was our thinking in those past irretrievable moments. However, some things are capable of being put right to a substantial degree. We cannot go back in time, but we can take steps in the present to redress certain relative failures of ours, specifically those regarding healthy lifestyle choices.
Of course, we don't get a "do-over" regarding the past 10, 20, or 30 years of relative neglect. But the very good news is that it's not too late to get back on track and obtain higher overall levels of health and well-being. It's not too late to begin making healthy lifestyle decisions that will provide a lifetime of benefit. Starting now, by taking action in the areas of regular exercise, a nutritious diet, and getting sufficient rest, you can obtain substantial across-the-board improvement in your health.^1,2
How is it possible to gain such improvement, despite however many years of lack of attention to regular exercise and unhealthy eating? The answers lie in the dynamic nature of human physiology and the complexity of its internal feedback structures. One such dynamic process is the adaptive response to mechanical stress. For example, Wolff’s law states that bones remodel along lines of physiological stress. Exercise causes long bones and the bones of your pelvis to bear increased physiological loads during relatively short intervals. In turn, these load-bearing bones are stimulated to build new bone. Your bones become structurally stronger in response to physiological work. Similarly, large muscle groups such as the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, pectorals, and latissimus dorsi are stimulated to increase their mass and bulk. Regular, vigorous exercise causes growth of additional muscular tissue and development of new networks of blood vessels to supply these muscles with necessary oxygen and nutrients. In addition to your musculoskeletal system becoming stronger, leaner, and more efficient, your heart and lungs develop increased capacity and become more resilient. Physiological dynamic responses are also engaged when you shift your dietary habits toward a healthy regime. No matter your current condition and circumstances, by engaging in regular, vigorous exercise and healthy eating habits you will dramatically improve your levels of fitness, health, and well-being.³
Looking back with regret as what has occurred will not help us achieve what we want to achieve in the here and now. We can apply 20/20 vision to our present choices and choose healthy lifestyle behaviors now and into the future. The beneficiaries include our families, our friends, and ourselves.
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¹Schnohr P, et al: Dose of jogging and long-term mortality: the Copenhagen City Heart Study. J Am Coll Cardiol 65(5)411:419, 2015
² Watson K, Baar K: mTOR and the health benefits of exercise. Semin Cell Dev Biol 36:130-9, 2014
³Kelley GA, et al: Effects of exercise on depression in adults with arthritis: a systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Arthritis Res Ther 17(1):21, 2015

The Home Stretch

Regular Chiropractic Care and Effective Stretching

Starting a stretching program is appropriate for most people. As we want to get the most out of our stretching routine, it's important to ensure that our musculoskeletal system is working at peak capacity. Regular chiropractic care performs these essential services by detecting, analyzing, and correcting spinal misalignments. Left uncorrected, such misalignments cause muscles, ligaments, and joints to become tight and irritated and also cause irritation to spinal nerves. By correcting spinal misalignments, your spinal nerves are free to conduct information properly between your brain and the rest of your body. Your musculoskeletal system is enabled to do its job properly. The result is that regular chiropractic care helps to optimize the functioning of our muscles, bones, and joints, thereby making our stretching and exercise time useful, healthful, and profitable.

Thanks to effective public health campaigns regarding healthy lifestyle choices, many people have incorporated regular, vigorous exercise, a nutritious diet, and getting sufficient rest in their daily routines. For many people, an additional important component of a healthy lifestyle is regular stretching.
Regular stretching provides numerous benefits, including enhanced flexibility and adaptability of your musculoskeletal system, that is, your bones, muscles, and joints.¹ As a result, regular stretching helps improve overall mobility and range of motion. Regular stretching helps reduce injury by improving circulation, bringing increased supplies of oxygen and critical nutrients to the large muscles of your thighs and legs and the small muscles of your back. As a bonus, regular stretching helps to reduce stress. It's clear that stretching activities provide a very big return for a modest investment of time and effort.^2,3
In order to derive the greatest benefits from your stretching program, knowledge of stretching "best practices" is essential. First, it's critical to conceive of stretching as a journey rather than a destination. In stretching, we have to give up all our notions of how much we think we should be able to achieve. On any given day, our muscles will be tighter or less tight. On any given day, it will be "harder" or easier to obtain the stretchability of the day before. The best practice is to pay attention to your body, focus on what you're doing, and work with what you have on a particular day. This "centering" approach is in direct contrast to trying to force your muscles to conform to the stretching length you think they should achieve. Using force while stretching will always result in injury. Instead, the activity of stretching calls for a calm, steady, and methodical approach.
What is it that you're doing when you stretch? Primarily, you're using a process of visualization. You're visualizing the particular muscle getting "longer". When you do a stretch for your hamstring muscle group (there are three muscles that comprise this group), you have an image in your mind of the muscles of the back of your thigh and you're "seeing" these muscles lengthening. You're not actually "doing" anything other than performing the activity of the stretch itself. In other words, you're not actively making the hamstrings longer. But you are "seeing" them lengthen in your mind, and the result is an effective stretch, that is, increased length and flexibility of the hamstring group.
Pictures of the quadriceps muscle group (the muscles on the front of your thigh), the hamstring muscle group, the calf muscles (the surface gastrocnemius and the deeper soleus), and your spinal muscle groups will provide great assistance with your visualization process. Such images are widely available on the Internet. Your "Zen-like" process of visualization will make your 10 or 15 minutes of stretching time more effective and may also be applied to various other tasks throughout your day, providing additional ongoing benefits to your health and well being.
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¹Peck E, et al: The effects of stretching on performance. Cur Sports Med Rep 13(3):179-185, 2014
²Morrin N, Redding E: Acute effects of warm-up stretch protocols on balance, vertical jump height, and range of motion in dancers. J Dance Med Sci 17(1):34-40, 2013
³Avloniti A, et al: The Acute Effects of Static Stretching on Speed and Agility Performance Depend on Stretch Duration and Conditioning Level. J Strength Cond Res 2014 Jun 17 [Epub ahead of print]

The Top Shelf

Shoulder Rehabilitation and Regular Chiropractic Care

Effective shoulder rehabilitation frequently depends on factors other than those related to the shoulder itself. For example, obtaining improved shoulder range of motion and improved shoulder girdle strength may be directly related to the functioning of your neck and the regional neck musculature. Your seven neck vertebras have a big responsibility. Not only do they support the weight of your head all day long, but they also provide a structural framework for the complex web of muscles that move your head in all directions and interface with chest muscles involved in respiration. Beyond this, regional neck muscles are closely interconnected with shoulder girdle muscles. Rehabbing the shoulder means paying attention to neck muscles as well. Regular chiropractic care helps ensure that the spinal joints and muscles of your neck are functioning at peak efficiency. Therefore, regular chiropractic care is a critical component of any successful shoulder rehabilitation program.

Many adults begin to develop shoulder pain, even though they may not have sustained a specific injury. It's important to pay attention to such shoulder issues, as a healthy shoulder joint is the key to full function of the upper extremities. We all know at least one person whose ability to perform normal activities of daily living has been significantly compromised by chronic shoulder pain. Conservative treatment may be of benefit, but the key, as always, is to prevent these problems before they occur. The primary prophylactic intervention, as is the case for most musculoskeletal conditions, is exercise.
We all agree that the human body's design is magnificent. Every component has a purpose, down to the smallest cell. Every system is deeply interconnected with every other. Miraculously, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. And yet, there are a few "gotchas" built-in to this ingenious design. With respect to the shoulder, the "gotcha" relates to the shoulder joint's extraordinary mobility. The shoulder joint has the greatest range of motion of all the joints in your body. But this extreme mobility comes at a price, that is, the shoulder joint is not a particularly stable joint. For example, shoulder dislocations comprise approximately 50% of all such injuries.
Shoulder pain in the absence of a specific injury often represents damage to the rotator cuff. Again, the design of the shoulder joint and surrounding soft tissues is implicated in these rotator cuff problems. The blood supply to the bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons of the shoulder is consistently compromised during normal motion of the shoulder above 90º, as in placing an object on or taking an object down from the top shelf in a kitchen cabinet. If much of your day is spent with your arm elevated above 90º to the front or to the side, over time you may develop nagging shoulder pain. Worse, with persistent repetitive motion above 90º, nagging shoulder pain may become chronic pain that restricts activities.
The best approach to shoulder problems is to become aware of the rotator cuff's well-known tendency to develop degenerative changes. We can be proactive by doing strength-training exercises for the shoulder and incorporating these exercises in our weekly exercise program as soon as possible.^1,2 Beginning such exercises in the teenage years would be ideal. For those of us who are older, the right time to begin shoulder strength training is now. Shoulder exercises stimulate growth of new muscle fibers, increase the size of muscle fibers already in existence, and stimulate growth of nerve fibers bringing information to and from all shoulder girdle structures.
Shoulder exercises should be done once or twice a week as part of your overall fitness program. As with all exercise that's new to you, start slowly and gradually increase the level of difficulty over time.³ The result of all this activity is a dramatically improved blood supply to the shoulder region and a dramatically reduced tendency for rotator cuff degeneration and injury.
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¹Choi SH, Lee BH: Clinical Usefulness of Shoulder Stability Exercises for Middle-aged Women. J Phys Ther Sci 25(10):1243-1246, 2013
²Saltychev M, et al: Conservative treatment or surgery for shoulder impingement: systematic review and meta-analysis. Disabil Rehabil 37(1):1-8, 2015
Another example of a common issues
³Daenen L, et al: Exercise, not to exercise, or how to exercise in patients with chronic pain? Applying science to practice. Clin J Pain 31(2):108-114, 2015