“Rehab” for life.
And fix your training program.
If the injury was substantial enough to permanently remodel tissue (stretching ligaments or tearing something that needs to be reattached) the need to rehab is quasi-permanent.
But “rehabbing” is often just doing exercises you should do anyway with greater and more intentional focus.
For example my left shoulder dislocated four times and had one operation when I was in my teens and early 20s.
If it ever hurts it’s because I wasn’t doing enough to strengthen it’s ability to bear load in various positions and directions while being kept flush to my body.
Every few years I’ve developed pain in my shoulder that occurs during irregular protraction and it disappears after a few days or a week or two of banded protraction exercises.
Recently I was doing some exercises that were very heavy on external rotation and lateral pulling without proportional counterbalancing of internal rotation and lateral squeezing, and it destabilized my shoulder allowing me to feel pain in a wide variety of positions.
I experimented with exercises and the simplest way to correct it was to do cable or banded internal rotation.
None of these problems ever happen to my right shoulder.
They only happen to my left shoulder, which is not held in place effectively by my stretched ligaments, requiring more work of my muscles to coordinate it, especially in keeping it close to my body.
This also manifests as a defective frontal lat display, even when I have zero pain.
Pictures had made me think my left lat is smaller than my right. But I disproved this taking a picture of my lat spread from the back with a measuring tape. In fact it is just that my protraction on my left side is not strong enough to compensate for my stretched ligaments which manifests as a weaker frontal lat display.
The work I need to do to rehab, though, is a result of an imbalanced program.
Protraction should be abundant. An easy way to get it in is to do gymnastic pushups instead of regular pushups.
If you do the full range of things you should be able to do with your shoulder, you will get plenty of work of the internal rotators that keep it flush to the body. That means having them not just push weight in front of you or on top of you but also be moving loads where the resistance is outside your body and moving into or across it.
If you introduce an exercise that moves your body in one way you should counterbalance it with an exercise that moves it the opposite way, unless you are introducing a temporary and strategic asymmetry.
So, on the one hand, your need to rehab could be forever.
On the other hand, rehabbing it is just compensating for the deficiencies of your program.
In fact, you probably got injured because of the deficiencies of your training in the first place.
For example, I had biases in my falling that made me spiral forward from left to right, plunging my left shoulder into the ground.
I should have trained how to fall, and I should have found and corrected that asymmetry.
I do both now, but I can still subtly feel that same asymmetry:
When I was 14 it made me spiral forward across my body to the right, plunging my left shoulder into the ground.
Now what I feel is that when I do forward and backward rolls, the backward roll over my left shoulder, which takes my right side backwards across my body, feels hard to coordinate compared to the other three rolls.
The asymmetry formerly forced me forward to the right. Now it subtly restrains me from gracefully rolling backward to the left.
I was injured in the first place because I didn’t find and train out my asymmetries.
The injuries have created a lifelong vulnerability of shoulder pain in response to far less glaring deficiencies in my training program.
But if I train right, I have no pain. And I don’t need to rehab because proper training is always rehabbing everything.
July 30, 2026 292
