Wellness Tip of the Week: An exercise routine for shoulder health

This week’s Wellness Tip with Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, focuses on improving posture, reducing injury risk during lifting and movement, and strengthening the rotator cuff—a group of muscles and tendons surrounding the shoulder joint. In the video, Shaw demonstrates an exercise routine that can be done with an exercise band for more strength and durability in the shoulders.

Below is a partial transcript:

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Welcome to the Tip of the Week with Coach Aaron Shaw. Today, I want to focus on giving you strength, stability, and durability in your shoulders and improving your posture and decreasing your risk of getting injured when you're lifting and moving things around.

All we need is an exercise band, something sturdy to tie it off to. So, this band is a big oval band, and you could do a single, long band just tied around, again, something sturdy.

And what we're doing is we're correcting this kind of, what tends to be a forward, rounded posture. So, we're going to work on stabilizing our shoulders and strengthening our rotator cuff. Rotator cuff injuries are very common. Rotator cuffs kind of deteriorate over time, so we want to make them as durable as possible.

So, you tie this band off to something sturdy, grab one end in each hand. What you're going to do, kind of give a nice, split stance, so your posture is nice and stable. You feel secure. You're going to give this band a row. That's step 1.

Step 2 is, from this row position, you're going to rotate your palms up and pull the band out to the side. So, in this position, you may feel like your shoulder blades are kind of squeezing together, a little bit activated. Then you're going to close this book. So, I always think of this as like opening a book, closing a book, and then return to the starting position.