Friday, October 27, 2006

Yo, Stretch

One of the stretches that they showed me at the therapy place which has been pretty effective involves sitting in front of a flat plane, such as a table, and sliding my hand way out to the left, getting my shoulder down as low as I can, doing that a couple of times, then doing the same thing going straight out, a couple of times. A variant is to keep my forearm resting in one place and rotating my trunk down below the level of the table.

That's worked well, but its a real pain hauling that table around, so I've started doing a variant of that, which seems to be as effective, and possibly a bit more. Basically, I slide my hand up a door jamb as high as I can (sliding is easier for me than trying to lift it), then, keeping my hand in one spot, I slowly turn in one direction, then the other -- going for stretch, not pain.

It works so well that this afternoon I was (barely) able to reach to an upper shelf in the kitchen. Couldn't grab squat, but I could touch it -- which I could not, last week. So this is goodness.

Its also, I'm told, fun to watch my expression if I just drop my arm rather than using the other to lower it slowly. My shoulder notices it.

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