On Feb 10, 4:03 pm, jeff potter wrote:
PS: It seems that the shoulder injury I recently got from just
slipping when I was standing on my skis hasn't affected my skiing. It
hurts in a range of motion that the poling action doesn't seem to
involve. I skied 1.5 robust hrs today without noticing anything. Altho
if I sit and scrunch my shoulders I can make a pain occur. So
something got tweaked but poling doesn't bother it.

Well that sounds familiar. I lived with a torn rotator cuff for 20
years
and it didn't really bother me when skiing either, classic or skating.
Bothered me a lot during various other activities, particularly
swimming, though I did still manage to get somewhat proficient at
triathlon for a period during that time. Ski poling is pretty much
straight forward and back, which you can get away with. Many
other activities have a lateral component that rotator cuff sufferers
find painful.

My complaints aren't bad enough to warrant going to the doc at this
point---but I'm interested in preventative measures.

I googled some and found serious info---but it all spun over to either
tennis or baseball pitching. But in general it seemed to involve
conditioning in all directions---so maybe I'll just try that. I think
I can do such motions with my TheraBand elastics---maybe just need
to brush up on my core or on motions that aren't dominantly used in
poling---I'm sure those are fine.

There's a variety of theraband exercises that are appropriate, in the
proper order, but one of the bigger preventative measures has to do
with re-training the muscle firing sequence. I forget the names of
the
muscles involved, but the gist of it is that when you injure the
rotator
cuff, you unknowingly pick up a bad muscle sequencing habit that just
makes thing worse. What you have to re-learn is to first contract the
muscle in your back that pulls the ball downward out of the shoulder
socket before you raise your arm. This opens up the joint enough
that the bones aren't grinding away at the tendons when you raise
your arm. Any decent PT should be able to set you on the right
course, but the important part is to start with very low resistance,
just
the weight of your arm is plenty, and get the muscle firing sequence
working properly first. It's easy to overdo it and just make things
worse if you try to self-coach this.

-Mitch