Shoulder and Elbow Pain With Calisthenics (body weight)

Now I'm going to talk concerning you calisthenics lovers and street workout addicts. I have a deep passion for working out with body weight, but sometimes, your shoulders and your elbows hurt when you learns something new, have over done it, or done something with a cramp, it goes on and on. But I'll point it all out.

There are a lot of bad and messed up things you can do to your body in body weight training. To be honest with you, weightlifting dangers are bigger and scarier because those are more dangerous, but you can wreck joints, rip tendons, fracture bone structures, and tear muscles just as easy in calisthenics.

   So when you have joint pain, you take care of it. You don't just keep going, you're going to make it worse.

   I'll start at the elbows like I did with the last post. Your elbows are important, and connect your forearm which is connected to your hand which either holds onto stuff or pushed you upwards from the ground.

   First, I'll start with the presses and push ups. Your shoulders have a series of tendons leading down to your elbows and then your hands. The tendons in your elbows will sometimes shift, pop, and move around. If they're doing that during a workout, you need to rest a bit, check your form out, and fix things. I really haven't found much in the ways of push ups to cause elbow pain unless it's damage from too many of them, or from something else that happened that has nothing to do with exercise.

   I'm not physician, but when it comes to pull ups and levers, those are dang hard on your elbows if you're doing the super advanced sets and workouts!

   To begin with, one armed pull ups. Those are essentially one handed handstand push ups (I've seen them done) but in reverse. So if you think about it, one handed handstand push ups are incredibly difficult, you're balancing your body, as well as the crushing force of every ounce of your being is resting on your elbow. You're going to want to be careful.

   In a sense, one armed pull ups are harder on your joins than one handed handstand push ups, (hypothetically) because you don't have to use so much of your core balancing yourself which allows you to put more energy into pulling yourself upward, therefor allowing you to exert even more strain into muscles which breaks them down, makes them stronger and denser, but it also puts more strain on your joints.

   Goes for your shoulders too. If you jump into one armed pull ups, you simply aren't able to do them without conditioning your shoulders. But you can mess your shoulders up with these. Bad form in the one arm pull ups is possible. If you hold your shoulder just right, you can mess your rotary cuffs up and hurt yourself. So be prepared, keep a safe number until you know you can handle the worst, and good form. When the injury does happen, (you're working out, something somewhere somehow some way will need some kind of repair time no matter what) you need to give it time, and let it repair itself. If you can work out around the injury, great, keep going.

   Now concerning things with hand balancing techniques and odd and awkward positions for your body, you need to baby your shoulders. For those of you who do hollow backs, or just generally enjoy doing bridges, or possibly bridge push ups, (tutorial for later) because of the position that you are in and your body is not used to that, you can mess your shoulders up.

   I certainly have. I would do hollow backs with straight elbows and the moment I put my shoulders to the max and bent my elbows to get close to the ground, my right shoulder would pop and go out, as well as even if I tried pushing back for shoulder flexibility practice in the bridge.

   In a case of this, don't push yourself to that point of discomfort so you can make yourself tougher and get used to the pain, that's incredibly stupid and I've seen it done. Where you go from here is you work around it. If it corrects itself like my issue did, I'm back into hollow back push ups for instance, but I had to wait.

   Time is medicine here, and if it's a permanent issue, you might as well ditch that exercise and stick to the ones that don't cause you problems. Work around your problems, fix your problems, and you will have no problems.

   The Fitness Cookie

Shoulder Pain For Gym Rats: look at my previous post.