Shoulder pain during bowling

Belter of a question in from Ian

He is struggling with some arm pain

Here is what he asked

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Hi Ross,

Big fan of your content, I only wish I discovered you guys sooner.

I would really appreciate your advice on something...

I'm a fast bowler who's been out of action for 10 months now with a shoulder injury.  The pain started in the back of my shoulder when bowling at winter nets but after a couple of weeks I started feeling the pain in my upper arm (just behind the tip of my delt). 

I've had an MRI done which doesn't show anything, and my consultant can't workout what is wrong with it.  I have a full range of movement and the injury doesn't effect me in my day to day life.  The only time I feel it is when putting power through it when bowling or throwing.

I'm running out of options and winter training is fast approaching in the new year, so I was wondering have you ever worked with bowlers who have experienced this kind of problem in the past?  If you have, any suggestions on what I can do would be very gratefully received.

I've done a lot of band work on my rotator cuff but this has not helped.  I've also been strengthening around my shoulder blade and general stability work without success.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ian

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Right there is some great things here to get teeth stuck in to!

First up it would look to me that structurally the actually shoulder would seem to be ok, given then the MRI and the consultant couldn’t find much wrong with it

And the fact that you have the full range of movement and no pain in anything but bowling would suggest that attacking this with a purely shoulder rehab kind of way would generally be wasting your time

So we need to look above and below, see how your moving, what might be causing the issue

Have a watch of this video about the whole upper body, how it moves and is linked, and see if there might be something obvious that you have, like the anterior tilt of the pelvis that could be having knock on effects https://youtu.be/m38SNmzcT_M

Then I'd be hitting around the area with soft tissue work, getting the therapy balls into the lat, tricep, and pec for sure, taking any muscular tightness out of the equation (loads of these drills in the Inner Circle)

What id do then is some specific rotator cuff work, to make sure the deceleration job that its supposed to do is actually working, here is another video for progressions there https://youtu.be/_6evHL4Fg2A

Hopefully we can get it nailed and have you back pain free

Cheers

Dewsy