Got Shoulder Pain? Hanging Offers a Simple Solution

What if I told you that there is a single solution to many shoulder problems. I know, it sounds too good to be true, but the results speak for themselves. A simple exercise called dead hanging (aka passive/active hangs) does the trick. It’s outlined in a book called Shoulder Pain? The Solution & Prevention by Dr. John M. Kirsch, an orthopedic surgeon with more than 30 years in practice.

Whether you’re an athlete or an office worker, you can benefit from this exercise. For most, inactivity hounds our shoulder joints.

“Your grow into the position you spend the most time in. If you spend many hours a day with your hands in front of you on a keyboard, your upper arm not moving and your shoulders are going to become very comfortable in that position. If you never move the arms into the opposite direction, you no longer have access to a full range of motion through the joint.”(Breaking Muscle)

If you have chronic shoulder pain, then this exercise can reshape the space in the shoulder, strengthen the shoulder muscles, and erase chronic shoulder pain in as little as 10 days.

Here’s why the dead hang is so effective:

Lots of people are dealing with shoulder pain from impingement, rotator cuff injury, or frozen shoulder. The typical treatment is rest and physical therapy. And if that doesn’t work, expensive shoulder surgery. But the research shows that the most common surgery used to treat shoulder pain is no more effective than a placebo. 

Your shoulders were designed to move in many directions, including up, and when you don’t exercise their range of abilities, they atrophy and tighten. Hanging from a bar is an easy way to let your shoulders experience their full range of motion. What’s more, the passive stretch it provides can really help loosen and open things up and even help alleviate the “Quasimodo hunchback” that develops from sitting slouched over a computer all day. (ArtofManliness.com)

The exercise works by stretching the brachial arteries and strengthening the supraspinatus tendon. This is the tendon that’s mainly responsible for shoulder strength, mobility, and endurance.

When you raise your arms forward, the supraspinatus tendon gets pinched between your shoulder bones. That’s where the pinching sensation comes from when you try to raise an injured or compromised shoulder.

But when the arms are raised straight up as in the dead hang, this gives the tendon room to move and stretch without getting pinched. This allows you to exercise, stretch, and reshape this tendon and the surrounding muscles and bones. In fact, the more you dead hang, the better and stronger your shoulders will be.

Hanging is also a good way to elicit a stretch response in the myofascial system. Fascia is the plastic wrap like coating that surrounds your muscles and tissues and links muscles together, says a ScienceDirect paper.

Further, hanging from a bar also decompresses and stretches the spine. Numerous activities and movements in our contemporary lifestyle compress our spine. This includes extended periods of sitting, carrying heavy items, squatting, and even sleeping. Hanging in the dead hang position for even a few seconds at a time is effective in decompressing the spine by opening up the space that’s been lost between your bones, joints, and discs in your back. A significant advantage of this approach is that it’s a key factor in improving posture.

So who should perform the dead hang? It’s an exercise perfect for those who want to maintain healthy shoulders, or for those who already have shoulder pain and who have been given a diagnosis of subacromial impingement syndrome (SIS), rotator cuff injury or frozen shoulder.

How To Perform a Dead Hang (Passive Version)

This is a hang where you allow your shoulders to relax to cover your ears. This targets more of the passive structural integrity components than the more ‘muscular heavy’ hangs. Execution is super simple, as the following video shows.

Disclaimer: At first, it’ll feel nice to just hang on a bar, but hanging can get somewhat uncomfortable, especially when done for time. While the pain from hanging from a bar will not injure the shoulder, it must be accepted,” according to Dr. John M. Kirsch, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon who wrote a book titled Shoulder Pain?

How To Perform a Dead Hang (Active Version)

Active hangs are a type of straight arm (scapular) strength work. If you have a history of dislocating a shoulder, focus on these active hangs. These are useful for “engaging musculature and minimizing the demands on passive structural integrity while maximizing the active-component demand and adaptation. From a passive hang, simply bring the shoulders down, away from the ears, and retract the shoulder blades (pinch them together). (IdoPortal.com)

How To Perform a Dead Hang (Dynamic Version)

This is a combination of passive/active hangs AND momentum to initiate a variety of dynamic actions such as brachiation, swinging, dynamic release and catch and more. (IdoPortal.com)

The type of hanging you should do depends on your shoulder history, injury and pain level. According to antranik.org:

• If you have a history of shoulder pain or partial or full dislocations, then focus only on active hangs. These can be done with the feet on the ground as well for a modified version.

• If you have strong, healthy but inflexible shoulders focus on passive hanging for the most part.

• If you have healthy but weak shoulders (cannot pull/chin up or can only perform few reps), spend <1 minute on passive hangs and several minutes on active hangs.

What if You Don’t Have A Place To Hang?

If you're not a member of a gym, consider acquiring an Iron Gym doorway pull up bar. This bar doesn't require any screws and won't damage the door frame. Alternatively, you can use a set of rings (either hung from the ceiling or attached to a tree branch) or hang from the top of a door (with a towel thrown over), a staircase, a tree limb, or the top of a wall. Do whatever it takes to address your shoulder issues.

Hanging isn’t a panacea for all shoulder injuries. But if you’ve been struggling with shoulder pain and discomfort and nothing seems to work to alleviate it, hanging could be the solution. I highly recommend picking up a copy of Kirsch’s book — Shoulder Pain? The Solution and Prevention — to read all the details on his research and the hanging protocols he suggests for shoulder repair. 

I hope this straightforward, yet potent method proves as beneficial for you as it has for countless others. It's simple, effective, free, and doesn't require surgery. What could be better?