Shoulder Mobility 101

If moving your shoulders feels like a grind and you’re avoiding the activities you love because you’re afraid they might fall apart you’re not alone.

Maybe you’ve been told your posture is “bad.” Maybe you’ve tried yoga poses to “open your shoulders,” but nothing really worked. The truth is that most people don’t know where to begin when it comes to fixing their shoulders.

Let’s break it down.

The Problem

The shoulder is a very complex joint and its structure makes it the most mobile joint in the body. Because of our sedentary and/or repetitive sports practices, we tend to overuse some functions of the shoulder and completely neglect others.

This imbalance leads to compensations. Over time, those compensations turn into restrictions, and those restrictions eventually turn into pain.

Most people will thereafter jump to “corrective exercises”. The issue is that most corrective drills are just quick fixes. They scratch the surface but never get to the root cause of the problem.

If you want shoulders that are not just mobile but resilient, you need to rebuild their fundamental functions from the ground up.

The Shoulder Is Not Just One Joint

The “shoulder” is actually not a single thing, from an anatomy perspective it is made of four joints, but two are especially important for us:

• The gleno-humeral joint: the ball-and-socket joint between your arm and your torso.
• The scapulo-thoracic joint: the sliding connection between your shoulder blade and your ribcage. (Technically not a “true” joint, but let’s save that geeky debate for another day.)

These two work together, along with muscles and connective tissue, to let your arm move freely in all directions.

Fundamental Shoulder Functions

However, not all shoulder movements are created equal. Some functions are foundamental. They need to be strong and reliable before you can build more advanced movements on top.

At the base of this hierarchy are the rotator cuff muscles, the deepest layer of shoulder muscles. As the name suggest, their main role is rotation. That’s why so many warm-ups focus on rotation work. Without it, the rest of the shoulder simply doesn’t operate well.

And among these rotations, there’s one that often gets ignored but is absolutely crucial: internal rotation. If this function is weak or restricted, everything else in the shoulder chain suffers.

 

How to Train Internal Rotation

There are multiple ways to train it, one of my favorite starting points is the sleeper stretch position. It’s simple, accessible, and effective for reclaiming lost range of motion.

In this video, I show you how to safely work on internal rotation using the sleeper stretch.

In a next article, we’ll build on this by adding external weights to strengthen internal rotation and turning your shoulders into titanium.