June '24 - Arm and Shoulder Injury 2

Arm and shoulder injury prevention and rehabilitation part 2

I'm going to cut to the chase and say that unnecessary tension is the main source of pain in the arm or shoulder after throwing. But knowing that doesn't simply fix the issue and identifying where you are holding or applying unnecessary tension and how to release it isn't always easy. This is such a common problem faced by many martial artists, let alone people doing sports and other physical activities in general.

We tend to focus on how throwing bo shuriken is different to throwing a ball. But in fact throwing different types of balls in different sports all have their own style and action. If you read the physio articles about throwing sports they tend to group dynamic overhead actions and say that the issues, rehab and maintenance of good performance is actually common between them all.

So we can learn a lot from the heap of information that's out there even though our style and movement of action is specific to what we're doing.

The next thing we can state is that often pain from throwing is in smaller muscles and that these muscles are related to decelerating the arm in the final phase of the throw, rather than the bigger muscles involved in acceleration of the arm before release of the shuriken.

The next post will explore this important point in more detail. Then after that we'll take a step back to look at each phase of the throw and where the risk points are, talk about basic maintenance of condition for throwing and recovery from this sort of injury.

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