When posture becomes a painful prison for your shoulder, here's how to break free

Your arms have a hidden lever for their reach and strength - your shoulder blades. A healthy shoulder blade (SB) is like a silent stagehand in a play—moving props, shifting scenery, making sure the star (your arm) can shine. 

What a healthy dance between the shoulder blade and arm feels like

Your arm and shoulder blade as dance partners. In a healthy shoulder, they move in harmony—one leads, the other follows, and the movement feels fluid and supported. When you reach for something, the SB glides away from the spine to support that motion. This gliding action is what gives your arm that extra length —even though your arm bones are a fixed length. When you push or pull with your arms, the shoulder blade acts like a biomechanical lever, giving your arm strength. 

How excessive posture correction can create biomechanical disharmony and shoulder pain

Posture habits like pushing the shoulders back and the chest forward can interfere with this natural movement. Over time, these postural overcorrections can train your upper back muscles to keep the shoulder blades pinched together near the spine. When the shoulder blade is stuck, it refuses to follow. This kind of biomechanical disharmony is often at the root of persistent shoulder pain, especially in conditions like shoulder impingement syndrome, or rotator cuff tendinopathy, where the shoulder blade’s movement is out of sync with the arm.

It’s like trying to walk forward while someone’s tugging on your backpack straps from behind. Your arm reaches, but your shoulder blade resists—pulling back toward the spine. That tug-of-war is called “cross motivation” and creates friction, tension, and eventually pain at the shoulder joint. Over time, this can lead to strain at your shoulder joint such as rotator cuff tendinopathy, where the tendons are repeatedly strained by poor coordination.

The tug of war tends to intensify with overhead arm movements showing up as frozen shoulder, bursitis or impingement

This conflict intensifies when you reach overhead. In a healthy shoulder, the bottom tip of the shoulder blade spreads around the sides of your ribs. If it can’t do that, the front of the arm rubs against a knobby part of the shoulder blade called the coracoid process. This friction—especially when repeated—can contribute to bursitis, impingement, or even frozen shoulder, where the joint becomes painfully restricted.

Bearing weight on your arms with a compromised shoulder like in a downward dog or playing arm overhead sports like pickle ball, tennis etc can make you vulnerable to injury. 

Restoring healthy shoulder and arm partnership

So how do we restore this healthy dance between your arm and shoulder blade?

By helping your shoulder unhinge from its stuck position and glide freely in all three planes. The Feldenkrais Method does this in a way that sets it apart from other modalities—and makes it especially effective for shoulder issues.

We don’t use force or manual manipulation. Instead, we gently exaggerate the habit. We shine the spotlight on it. We make the habitual movement of the shoulder blade congruent with the ribs, sternum, hips, and back. Because the habit isn’t bad—it just stuck in a rut. When we give the habit its rightful place in the context of whole-body movement, something shifts in the brain and musculature.

Treating shoulder pain with a brain learning approach can create lasting relief

When your shoulder blade begins to open to new possibilities of movement, your nervous system starts to remember, compare and choose:  “Oh yeah, I remember that! That feels nice. That feels way better than being stuck. Maybe I can choose that for some movements.”

This is brain learning and it’s pleasant. You’re drawn toward it. You begin to desire the change at a deeper, subconscious level. This kind of learning is sticky. It has the potential for lasting change because it changes your brain. A stuck shoulder is a stuck mind. A flexible shoulder can adapt to support what the arm is doing in the moment.  That’s not just a flexible shoulder—it’s a flexible mind.  

This approach is grounded in neuroplasticity—your brain’s ability to rewire movement patterns based on new experiences. When you gently interrupt old habits and offer your nervous system a more coordinated, pleasurable option, the brain learns. It remembers. And it begins to choose that new pattern more often, even outside the lesson. That’s how lasting change happens—not through force, but through felt understanding.

A Shoulder Workshop for lasting relief

If you’re someone who’s tried the typical exercise approach and finds the pain keeps coming back or your healing path with conventional approaches is looking long winded and uncertain, The Shoulder Workshop is for you. It connects shoulder health to your life, your activities, and your nervous system’s capacity for lasting change.

Join me for the upcoming Shoulder Workshop, where we’ll explore the 5 keys to a healthy shoulder, one of them is to restore the glidiness of the shoulder blade with movement that soothes your senses and your shoulder.