Tennis Rotator Cuff Atrophy: A Degenerative Injury That I Overcame with Physical Exercise

Sometimes when a sports person gets injured whether Professional or Amateur their automatic response is that they need to rest the injury or area of weakness in the body. With complex and serious injuries this is of course the case at first (perhaps actual tears of tendons, ligaments, bone fractures) but with lighter injuries or areas of weakness if targeted and diagnosed early enough the fact is the right form of targeted gentle exercise can lead to overcoming the injury surprisingly quickly rather than complete rest.

This is because some injuries are actually joints, ligaments, tendons and muscles wasting away (atrophy) rather than an actual tear or break. This proved true with my first ever injury obtained from tennis after almost 6 years of playing two to three times a week. I developed a shoulder injury with a particular group of muscles around my shoulder joint - the rotator cuff (https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/rotator-cuff-tears/) becoming weak because I wasn't serving properly. Thankfully I know a very experienced coach here in Thailand who has been an umpire at challenger level and also coached many tennis coaches. He runs his own club in Bangkok where two of the top 100 ATP and WTA players trained at last year.

After observing my serve he told me exactly what muscle was hurting and why.

First I decided to continue playing but reduce my play down to once a week so my shoulder had more time rest in between games. This lasted for 4 weeks until I could find a solution to strengthen my shoulder.

Within that four week period I did some research online about common shoulder injuries with tennis and found some exercises to test to see if they would help me target my muscle wastage and work on building strength. The Rotator cuff injury is not just common in tennis but any sport involving over the shoulder throwing techiques including Baseball and Volleyball.

Here is an excellent article on the subject - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2577490/, unlike many articles that fail to share detailed information of the problem this British Journal of Sports Medicine article goes into sufficient enough detail to help diagnose the general likely problem if you have a shoulder injury from tennis. In my case it was the Rotator Cuff and I managed to find an excellent video with just two exercises to do to repair the area through strengthening the muscles, in particular in a way that mimicked the serving motion.

I didn't see a specialist or sports physio, I just wanted to try overcome the problem myself.

This guy on YouTube has one of the top subscribed tennis coaching channels. Essential Tennis produced a quick video giving tennis players some easy to follow exercises for the shoulder pain.

After applying these four times a week, twice with no weight and twice with light weights at the gym I was able to overcome my injury in two weeks with no need for using an ice pack or any other additional treatments. I am now back to full health with my serve but I have also made an active effort to improve my technique and focus on not over rotating my arm and squashing it into my chest on the follow through. I have also increased the weight using both exercises now so my shoulder joints have become far more stable and resistant to atrophy.

Remarkably this bad habit was not picked up by many of my previous coaches when they observed me serving. Rather I figured only a coach that has seen this injury regularly occur before is the only one who would tend to spot it and correct it.

The take away from this article though is if you experience soarness after a sport or a minor injury try to diagnose it as soon as possible and whatever you do don't ignore it. If you listen to your body you will likely never experience a major injury but a minor one you can overcome.

Also try to work on the strengthening and conditioning every part of your body. If you neglect any area then the energy/force flowing through your body, especially with dynamic sports will likely overload your one weak area. If you have multiple weak areas due to a lack of conditioning of your whole body then your asking for trouble if you regularly play sports. In my case it was a lack of conditioning in my shoulders, something that since my injury I've worked on and introduced into my regular gym routine.