Who gets pec tears? Looking at the numbers, men are much more likely to get pec tears because of the bulk of the muscle and the stiffness associated with muscular hypertrophy in this region. The decreased flexibility can then result in tearing of the muscle or tendon. Just as in most tendon tears people are between age 30 to 50. The most common mechanism is a heavy bench press where the tendon is stretched as the bar comes down to the chest....

Our last post talked about anterior instability of the shoulder especially with dislocations or subluxation events.  I have seen this with overhead squats or snatches. What if someone is loose or unstable in different directions? What are the symptoms that can occur and how does this happen? If someone has loose ligaments then they may have something called multidirectional instability.  Typically this can occur in females from 20 to 50 years...

Has anyone told you that you are UNSTABLE?  An unstable shoulder can be very dramatic or more often a silent issue that rears its ugly head only in certain situations or movements. Who would have thought that your shoulder could give way on you? What does giving way mean?  People will describe looseness, laxity, a weak feeling, instability, that their shoulder is not in the right place. Normally a shoulder provides stability with ligaments,...

Shoulder surgery does not mean you have to lose everything you have worked so hard for. Some people are rightly concerned about injuring their repaired shoulders after surgery. These people make a surgeon feel better. Some people think the repair is healed right from day one and want to test it; these people frighten me despite my efforts at counseling. I think there is a compromise that can be achieved without losing your all important wind...

Here’s the setting. Masters competition, clean and jerk with a  toe to bar ladder (sound familiar), 50 year old male lifts a barbell for a clean and jerk and feels a searing rip in his arm and has to drop the bar. He cannot lift his arm away from his side and is in agony, maybe had a little “bursitis in past” but nothing bad enough to stop him. Second scenario is 40ish year old 930 class filled with bunch of overachievers and...

So how do we get SLAP tears? One mechanism is falling onto our shoulders, another is traction that we talked about earlier and another is repetitive stress. People will complain of clicking in that shoulder that they do not have in the other shoulder. Others will feel like something is moving around in their shoulder. They will typically point to the front and top of their shoulder right at the AC joint or sometimes even the back upper half of...