Do you have weakness or soreness in your shoulders? Do you want a simple exercise to work on rotator cuff strength and endurance? Try our home exercise for rotator cuff strengthening and stability. Rotator cuff drills I call them!

Hi this is Dana Ranahan from Body Works Sports Physiotherapy and today I want to show you an exercise for shoulder and rotator cuff strength. I often call these rotator cuff drills.

Grab a small weight, sometimes we start with something very small like a half pound, which is like a soup can at home, or a one pound weight. Here I have a two pound and a three pound weight, just to give you an idea of what they’re like.

We’re going to work on some arm raises, sort of long lever where your elbows stay straight in front of you and focus on controlling the shoulder blade position. The weights have to start light because we’re working on endurance.

Part One

Start by pulling our shoulders back in space and trying to keep our shoulders level so it’s not dropped
Raise the weight in front only to shoulder height.
So breathing out, breathe in come back down, breathing out, breathe in come down
Aim for eight to ten repetitions.

Part Two

Then the next we go to the side
Same motion, trying to keep your shoulders level, shoulder blades pulled back
Ten times to the side and then in the middle, which we call scaption.
We work on raising in this, in the middle position, same eight to ten times.

In all of these exercises, focus on maintaining your shoulder blade position and not letting your back sway. The goal is to do that while being able to pull the shoulder blades back, keeping your spine neutral. So give that a try.

If you have any pain with this please stop and give us a call and we can help you maybe find a more suitable exercise for you. For more information, please contact us at 604-983-6616.