02/16/2022
How to Improve Shoulder Health to Train Longer And Harder in your Tennis Lessons, Practice Matches and Tournaments.
Having bulletproof shoulders is important for a few reasons. The most important is to prevent injury. Next is to increase your training capacity. The more you practice any skill, the better you will become at it.
However, practicing any stroke in tennis can have negative consequences. At a certain point in a training session you can hit to many strokes and if you have a weak shoulder it can lead to pain and possibly missing practice time.
Understanding the anatomy and investing in Crossover Symmetry is a great way to bullet proof your shoulders and increase your pain free training capacity.
SHOULDER LABRUM 101...The labrum is an important shoulder stabilizer by:
1- Deepening the shoulder socket. 2- Providing an attachment to anchor ligaments and tendons. 3- Creating a negative pressure to further stability, kind of like a suction cup. It's in the conversation around shoulder pain often with 2 common types of injury.
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Sometimes labrum tears are due to an accident—like taking a fall on an outstretched arm or a lift that went wrong which forces the arm bone into the labrum ring. Sometimes the forces are so great that the shoulder dislocates. In these cases a labrum tear is almost guaranteed, typically resulting in what’s called a Bankart lesion.
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Or the labrum can also be injured by pulling on it. Notice in the picture how the bicep tendon attaches to the upper ring of the labrum. Stress that pulls on this attachment can peel away the upper part of the labrum ring, causing what’s called a SLAP tear. The SLAP tear is extremely common in baseball players due to the extreme layback that occurs as part of the throwing motion. Or it can also common when dropping down hard while hanging onto something (looking at you butterfly pull-ups.)
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72% of people over the age of 40 had a SLAP tear that was pain-free (Schwartzberg, 2016) and it's estimated that close to 80% of MLB players have some degree of labrum tearing (Miniaci, 2002). The point being is that many will still function and compete at a really high level despite an imperfect labrum. You just need to build stability via the muscles...check out our Blog post How to Fix a Torn Labrum to learn more (link in bio).