Prehab over Rehab (or 5 minutes to healthier shoulders)

As a smart, educated lifter (which I will presume you are on the basis of you reading this article and being a member of MuscleTalk), you will no doubt already be aware of the concept of 'prehab' exercise. For those of you not yet familiar with the term, allow me to enlighten you:

Prehab is a sports medicine term describing a sport specific / personalized exercise program designed for injury prevention. If you've spent a little time in this sport of bodybuilding, chances are you'll have already heard a number of horror stories detailing how some injury or other has sidelined some athletes training, perhaps forcing them to retire from the sport altogether. For some reason bodybuilding and injuries appear to go together like jam and bread (or Osagi and chimpanzees).
Damaged knees, wrecked lower backs, torn ligaments and pulled muscles all rank amongst the many injuries you can pick up in this sport, requiring anything from a few days or weeks off training to many months of rehabilitation for the more serious cases. However as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and nowhere does this ring truer than when it comes to lifting related injuries. The sad fact is that many of the injuries we can pick up in this sport could for the most part be prevented if we were prepared to spend just a little time focusing on proper warm-ups, mobility and flexibility exercises along with the heavier lifts and exercises that we spend the majority of our training time focusing on. Sure these heavier lifts may give us bigger and stronger muscles, but the chances are by focusing on these heavy lifts whilst neglecting these other important aspects of our training, we are setting our self up for some serious injury to occur, requiring us to take time out from training in this sport we love to focus on recovering and rehabilitating these injuries - if we can.

So this is where the concept of prehabilitation exercises comes in - dedicating a small amount of our training time to exercises and movements designed to make us a little less prone to picking up these injuries that may threaten our training. And when I say a small amount of time, really, that's all it takes - as little as 5 minutes at the start of your routine is all that's required. Five minutes which could save you 5 weeks, 5 months perhaps even 5 years of injury rehabilitation.
Seem worthwhile? Sure it does.

But how about giving us some examples, Osagi? Well, how about we take a quick look at the shoulder prehab routine I include at the start of my upper body workouts for starters? This routine is intended to increase the stability of various muscles and joints, whilst at the same time increasing and maintaining mobility and range of movement in key muscle groups with the ultimate aim being that I avoid picking up a nagging shoulder injury as the result of some muscle imbalance or lack of flexibility in this area. I like to include a number of movements in this routine, however as I typically don't have very much time to train, I've divided these movements up into a number of smaller, shorter routines which I cycle through over consecutive workouts, including these routines as part of my warm-up program:

** Routine 1:
Pull-up retraction
Barbell overhead shrugs
Rear delt stretch (arm across chest)

** Routine 2:
Band external rotations
Band pull aparts
Band dislocates

** Routine 3:
Scapular retractions (on seated row machine)
Push-up plus
Standing pec stretch

** Routine 4:
Incline DB Retraction
Prone YTWLs

I won't describe each individual movement as that would take forever, but these movements are all well documented on various sites across the web and it's something I can discuss in further detail on the forum. In terms of sets and reps, I cycle through each routine 2-3 times, with 12-15 reps for each movement.
Give it a go, see how you get on and whilst you're at it, run a search on prehab exercise routines and do a little more reading. Spending a little time up front educating yourself on this issue is far better then having to spend months with your feet up in front of the TV as a result of not being able to train due to some nasty injury which may well have been preventable!


Source: MuscleTalk.Co.Uk