Did you miss it? You can watch this online discussion, and many others, on the club’s youtube channel HERE.

Why do so many paddlers dislocate their shoulders? How do you know when a shoulder is dislocated? What do you do if it is?

How do you get through a paddling life without injuring your shoulders? And how do you get back to paddling after an injury?

There are so many burning questions about the shoulder and we talked about as many as we could fit! We reviewed some anatomy, discussed the injuries (mostly dislocation), and got deep into the fitness and form requirements for happy shoulders when paddling.

Our amazing panel of paddling athletes includes Anna Levesque (author of Yoga for Paddling, founder of Mind Body Paddle, former pro freestyle and extreme race athlete and much more), Jacob Selander (geologist, co-author of Rocks, Minerals & Geology of the Pacific Northwest and slalom and wildwater kayak competitor), Gavin Casson (environmental engineer, hand paddler), and Olivia Linney (MD specializing in emergency and wilderness medicine—and paddler, of course). We will also have three recordings made by Dr Jessie Stone (MD and founder of Soft Power Health who lives in Uganda and works on malaria) whose time zone made joining us live unrealistic.

HOMEWORK: Your homework for this course is to procure a stretchy rubber band for shoulder workouts. Even if you have healthy shoulders, even if you are young and still feel invincible, we recommend you get a band and learn how to do basic shoulder exercises using it.

Here are the recordings from Dr. Jessie Stone:

ShoulderVideo1 gives an overview of the shoulder for paddlers, covers tendonitis and tendinosis, and gives some great self-treatment ideas.

ShoulderVideo2 shows how to use a stretchy band to exercise your external rotators—two of the four muscles in the rotator cuff.

ShoulderVideo3 shows some rehab/conditioning exercises for the supraspinatus muscle and tendon, the most commonly injured one out of the four in the rotator cuff. If you hurt your shoulder bad enough that you can’t pick up your own arm and need a sling to be happy, you probably hurt this one.

You can also download a copy of the slide deck for this presentation here. If you do, you will see some slides that we didn’t cover because we ran out of time, including a couple about AC separation, and a whole section on the rotator cuff at the end.

We’re likely to talk about shoulders again next winter, because the rotator cuff deserves more attention. If you want to keep paddling later in life, regular rotator cuff maintenance is key.