External Rotator Reactive Activation

External Rotator Reactive Activation (ERRA) involves proactive exercises to improve the strength, power, and function of the rotator cuff muscles of the shoulder or external hip. This type of exercise helps to protect the joint from excessive forces or shear by making sure the muscles remain strong and active. The exercises are designed to apply external resistance against specific movements that work the rotator cuff muscles without overworking them. They also involve coordination and agility that can help to improve performance in sport

Transcript

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This is Brent, President of B2C Fitness, and
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in this video we're going to do external
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rotator reactive integration. Now, reactive integration, is where we choose
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an exercise to help increase the firing rate of one of our under active muscles.
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In upper body dysfunction, and dysfunction in general, it's a lot more
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than just, "this muscle's strong, and this muscle's weak", we have a lot of things
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going on, like inhibitions, over activities, firing rates, timing. This is one of those
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exercises that will help improve the timing, so that after we've corrected our
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length tension relationships, we have also helped increase the neuromuscular
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efficiency of that integrated synergy in our upper body. So, at this point, to kind
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of break it down, I'm going to assume that we've already done release and stretching
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for our short, overactive structures, and for our long, under active structures, we've
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done some sort of isolated activation. Now, in a previous video, we did external
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rotator, isolated activation. You have probably seen external rotation in
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a physical therapy studio, or in gym before. Watch that video, you could
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pick up a couple tips, where we use reciprocal inhibition, to get our
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overactive synergist to calm down. Now, the body blade, is going to help us
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create an exercise for those same muscles, but in a way that is
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going to help increase the rate at which they have to fire, now they're not going
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to just have to fire and contract, but they're going to have to fire in a
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timely fashion, in an efficient fashion, in a coordinated fashion. I'm going to have
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my buddy, Mike, from Metropolitan Fitness come out, and help me demonstrate this
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exercise. Now, first things first, I need to calm down my overactive synergists. So
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my overactive synergists in this case are my deltoids, and my supraspinatus.
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These are abductors of the shoulder. So what I'm going to have him do, is
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abduct against the towel. We're going to put this at about the level of his lower
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bicep. I'm also going to move him into the scapular plane.
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So, in the scapular plane, he's going to be slightly into flexion, and slightly in
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this way. I'm going to have him take optimal posture, so I'm gonna have his shoulder
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blades down and back, his chin tucked, he's up nice and tall, I'll go ahead and
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give him this body blade, and now all we're going to do with this body blade,
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is just little vibrations back and forth, and then I'm going to have him
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take that little vibration throughout his entire, comfortable, range of motion,
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or that range of motion which he can still keep optimal form. Now as far as
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reps go with this exercise, it's probably not going to be very accurate
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for me to say do a hundred shakes, or go back and forth five or ten times. The
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best thing to do, would probably be to time this exercise, starting off at
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somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds, and having Mike work up to about 60 or 90
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seconds. There are different sized body blades if we wanted to progress the
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amount of force that he actually has to control. This is one of the
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smallest body blades, I think it was designed, originally, for group classes.
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You could pick one of those up, and then, of course, they have the larger,
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standard model, and I think they even have a model larger than that. Alright,
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so this is external rotator, that's my teres minor, and infraspinatus, reactive
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integration. That's the exercises we're going to use to increase the firing rate
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of our under active structures, and hopefully you can utilize this within a
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corrective exercise model, or an integrated warm-up template, which
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includes our release, stretching, isolated activation, our reactive integration, and
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then follow this up with some sort of total body integration, or subsystem
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integration exercise. I hope you enjoyed this video and enjoy the burn you