Pendulum Exercise for Shoulder Pain
Injuries are common occurrences in sports and exercise. They occur due to overuse or lack of proper training.
If injuries do happen it’s best if they’re treated quickly so that the athlete doesn’t suffer further damage. For example, if a player gets injured while playing basketball, then it would be better if he could play through the injury rather than having him miss time from the sport.
The same principle applies to your body. If you get injured during a workout, then it’s best if you don’t have to spend time rehabbing the injury which will increase recovery times.
There are many ways of treating injuries and there are several exercises that can be used for different types of injuries. However, there is one exercise that is very effective at reducing pain and improving range of motion in your muscles.
It’s called the “pendulum” exercise.
What Is A Pendulum?
A pendulum is a device that is swung back and forth rapidly between two points. The movement of the pendulum causes it to swing up and down, but not too fast or too slow. The speed of the swing determines how far the pendulum swings before stopping again.
The same rule applies to the pendulum exercise for your body. By creating a similar movement in your body, you can reduce pain, increase blood flow and flexibility around painful joints or injured areas of the body.
How Is The Pendulum Similar To The Knee?
When you swing your knee forward and backward, it creates a similar movement as a pendulum. This is because the knee joint has a limited range of motion in that direction. It can only move so far before it hits a stopping point. Similar to how a pendulum won’t swing past its stopping points, your knee joint also has limited range of motion and can only bend and straighten so far.
How Can I Use This Information To Treat My Pain?
By performing the pendulum exercise, you can reduce pain in your knee and improve flexibility in the joint. This is because the motion of the knee joint during the exercise is very similar to the natural motion of your knee. By doing the exercise, you can improve flexibility of the knee joint and treat whatever pain you might be experiencing in that area.
How Do I Perform The Exercise?
Before you start doing the exercise, it’s important that you locate your painful knee joint. You should feel a slight ache or stiffness near and around that area when you’re seated or standing still. It’s important that you don’t feel pain anywhere else other than your knee joint. If you have pain in other areas then you should see a physician before doing this exercise.
How To Locate Your Knee Pain
You should always warm up before doing any sort of exercise to prevent injury and reduce pain. You can do some simple movements like walking or jogging in place for a few minutes before getting started.
After warming up, the first thing you need to do is to find the tight muscles that are causing your pain. Once you locate those areas, you can start to do the exercise in order to treat your pain and improve knee flexibility.
Here’s how you can locate the tight muscles:
Begin with your knee slightly bent in a sitting position. Slowly move your knee as far forward as you can without any pain or discomfort.
Mark this position with something, such as a piece of tape on the floor. Now try to move your knee backward as far as you can in the same smooth motion. Mark this position with something such as a piece of tape as well.
The two taped areas on the floor are your starting and stopping positions. These will help you check your flexibility over time by seeing how far you can move your knee in these two directions.
Now that you’ve located the tight muscles causing your pain, you can begin the exercise proper.
How To Do The Pendulum Knee Exercise
Begin with your leg slightly bent and pulled back behind you so that your foot is just above the floor. Slowly rock your knee forward and backward in a pendulum-like motion.
Every time your knee reaches the farthest point to the right, pull it backward as far as you can. Continue moving your knee back and forth in this manner. Try to keep a steady rhythm going if you can.
This exercise will help increase the range of motion in your knee joint. The more you do it, the looser your muscles will become around the knee area and the less pain you’ll experience when you have it in a bent position.
Continue doing this exercise until you no longer feel pain or tightness in that specific knee joint.
A common mistake that people make while doing this exercise is that they overstretch their knee and end up hurting themselves. If you experience a sharp pain during or after the exercise, you should stop what you’re doing and see a physician because you may have injured yourself.
How many times should you do this exercise each day?
You can do this exercise as frequently as you want, but it’s best to do it at least once every day. You can certainly do more than that if you want, but it’s best to not do it too much because then your knee muscles won’t have time to rest and they’ll get sore.
How long will it take to see results from this exercise?
You should start to feel results after a few sessions. It all depends on how bad your knee pain is to begin with and how tight your knee muscles are. As your knee pain starts to go away and you can start bending it further, you can up the ante a bit and make the exercise more challenging.
You can go faster with the movement or you can add another movement where you pull your heel up as close as you can to your bottom during the backward part of the motion. Either way, the basic concept remains the same.
Add This Leg Strengthener To Your Routine!
Once you start to experience relief from your knee pain or you can easily bend your knee to a 90 degree angle, you should switch to a different exercise so that your muscles don’t get used to the same routine. You need to keep them guessing if you want the best results in the least amount of time.
Strengthening your legs in general will help alleviate pain and stiffness throughout your body as you get older. This is because strong muscles help support your body better.
They also help you function on a day-to-day basis.
One of the best exercises that you can do for your legs is the squats. You’ve probably seen people do these in the gym before when they’re holding a barbell on their back and going up and down.
You don’t need a barbell to do them though. You can do bodyweight squats if you want to or you can do pool squats, which involve holding onto the sides of a pool and going down as far as you can into the water and coming back up.
Squats are a very versatile exercise that work your entire leg muscles and most of your lower body. They’re a very efficient exercise to strengthen your knees because they put a lot of pressure on them.
The more pressure you can put on your knees, the stronger they’ll get in response.
The main reasons why people don’t like to do squats is because they find it too hard to do correctly or they just don’t want to lower themselves that far down. If it’s the first reason, then you should keep practicing because once you get the hang of them, they’re very effective.
If it’s the second reason, then there are other alternatives such as the ones mentioned above.
The Bottom Line
If you want to get rid of knee pain, strengthen your knees, and be able to do all the things that you couldn’t do before, then follow the advice in this article. If you’re already doing everything you can to strengthen your knees but the pain persists, you may need to see a doctor.
There could be an underlying condition that needs to be looked at. However, if you’ve seen a physician and they couldn’t find anything wrong, then it’s most likely the wear and tear from doing the things you love to do. That doesn’t mean you can’t still participate in those activities though. It just means you need to continue doing the exercises mentioned in this post to give your knees the best support they can get so you can keep doing what you love for as long as you can.
Best Wishes,
Arthur Davis
CEO/Founder
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PD Training Solutions
Luxury Brand Management
Last update on 2019-02-02 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
Sources & references used in this article:
Electromyography of selected shoulder musculature during un-weighted and weighted pendulum exercises by AA Ellsworth, M Mullaney, TF Tyler… – … physical therapy …, 2006 – ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Activation of the shoulder musculature during pendulum exercises and light activities by JL Long, RA Ruberte Thiele, JG Skendzel… – … sports physical therapy, 2010 – jospt.org
Electromyography of the shoulder: an analysis of passive modes of exercise by ML Dockery, TW Wright, PC LaStayo – Orthopedics, 1998 – healio.com
Shoulder Motion Analysis During Codman Pendulum Exercises by G Cunningham, C Charbonnier, A Lädermann… – … , and rehabilitation, 2020 – Elsevier
