How To Treat A Rotator Cuff Injury Video

An untreated rotator cuff injury will lead to discomfort, limited strength and mobility. Learn how to treat a rotator cuff injury in this sports medicine video.

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Determine strain or tear
Contact a doctor
Restore range of motion
Use strength exercises

About this Author

Russ Paine is a well-known physical therapist with the Roger Clemens Institute at Memorial Hospital. After getting his degree in physical therapy from Texas Women's University, he trained for several years under David Drez, MD, a renowned surgeon and sports medicine specialist. He has been a rehab consultant for the Houston Rockets, Houston Astros and NASA. He has given hundreds of presentations in his career in the US and abroad, and has published many chapters in text books and papers in peer review journals.

RUSS PAINE: Today we're going to talk about rotator cuff injuries. You can have a tear to the rotator cuff or a strain to the rotator cuff. So what we're going to show at this point is just the rotator cuff muscles. This is part of your scapula, your shoulder blade, this is called the acromion process of your shoulder. The rotator cuff, as you lift your arm up and away from your body, slides in and out underneath this arch. There's also a ligament called the coracoacromial ligament and in between the rotator cuff and this arch is a subacromial bursa. So that can cause you to have pain when that bursa gets swollen and inflamed. So we'll show that on that shoulder model here and then our real model. So this is looking at the shoulder model and you can see as you lift your arm away from your body, this arch, right here, from the coracoid process up to the acromion, there's a ligament and there's not much room for error. So as you lift your arm away from your body, that can get pinched and cause you to have pain. Now, typically rotator cuff injury start in the supraspinatus tendon here and they go to the back and to the front. So rehabilitating this injury, you really need to know if you just have a little rotator cuff strain or you have a cuff tear, and the only way to do that is to see a physician and they typically do an MRI with dye to distend the soft tissue structure to see if you have a cuff tear or a cuff strain. So, again, what we do to evaluate that is just have someone push out against my hand here and you can see the rotator cuff muscles firing. This is the deltoid muscle--relax--and it kind of covers up the rotator cuff. But restoring range of motion is really important, doing a cross-body stretch is very important so this motion gets back to normal and then we institute rotator cuff strengthening exercises because the most important function of the rotator cuff is to pull the ball into the socket. So if the rotator cuff is weak and you start to lift overhead then what happens is this deltoid muscle shoves this ball up into the arch and creates impingement. So rotator cuff strengthening is really key. Just like quadriceps strengthening is important to the knee, the rotator cuff is important in restoring normal function of the shoulder.

How to Treat a Rotator Cuff Injury Video

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