You might hurt these muscles, and then try to protect them when you reach or lift something by substituting certain larger muscles that connect the shoulder blade and collarbone to the vertebrae of your neck. UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL THERAPYĮXERCISE PROGRAM FOR SHOULDER AND NECK PAIN Shoulder and neck pain is often the result of a very slight injury to the smaller muscles that surround your shoulder joint. In doing so, they strengthen and reinforce the normal synergy, and avoid substituting a synergy that ignores the rotator cuff muscles and leaves them vulnerable to reimpingment and reinjury. Under a sufficiently low resistance, less than the weight of the arm in this case, a person can activate the normal muscle synergy, which combines the rotator cuff muscles with more superficial glenohumeral and scapulothoracic muscles, as they perform a task that closely resembles a typical reaching pattern. The dowel exercises, for which patient instructions appear below, are designed to permit the patient to practice the reaching synergy under very low loads. Winstein and her colleagues (1989) showed, for example, that weight-shifting skills do not necessarily transfer from one task to another.

Therapists must respect the integrity of task-specific synergies.

However, we should not assume that exercises aimed at individual muscles will improve those muscles' contributions to the muscle synergies that a person must activate during actual reaching tasks. Therapists commonly strengthen shoulder muscles, including rotator cuff muscles, in an isolated manner using individual exercises. The dowel bears the weight of the person's upper limb and lets them duplicate or approximate reaching activities, but places extremely low demands on their injured muscles and joints. I advocate exercises that employ a dowel, broomstick, or other device for older people who have impingement syndrome, and who cannot reach for objects without pain. Exercise to restore muscle synergies in reaching Reaching without pain: A therapeutic exercise to restore appropriate muscle synergies

Broomstick exercises