The Foundation Needed for Shoulder Performance

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The Crossover Symmetry Training Zone delivers education for:

Baseball, volleyball, swimming, golf, football, softball, tennis, lifting heavy weights, rehabbing shoulder pain, and simply slinging kids around.

Leading people to believe that each activity needs a different training program…

Which is not the case!

Each sport uses the same 5 shoulder programs to warm-up, strengthen, and recover.

No doubt each activity needs a variety of strong and powerful movements; and each sport has very specific skill requirements, taking years of repetition, training, and coaching to master.

Underneath those specific demands is a foundation of shoulder function, which needs mastery to excel at your sport or activity.

Prime Movers vs. Stabilizers

The muscles of the shoulder joint can be divided into two categories:

  • Prime Movers
  • Stabilizers

The prime movers are the big dogs.  These strong muscles generate powerful movements of the arm (i.e.- pitching, the golf swing, swim stroke, volleyball spike, etc.).

They want to forcefully contract and not held back with a secondary function like generating stability!

The function of the stabilizers is to set up the scapula and arm position for optimal performance. Their contribution to sport-specific movements is much less than the prime movers but no less important!

Because deficient stabilizers need the prime movers to help pick up the slack. This leads to decreased performance, wasted energy, less accuracy, and predisposes an athlete to shoulder injuries due to poor biomechanics.

Build on The Foundation

Regardless of the upper extremity activity, underperforming stabilizers will take away from the body’s ability to unleash when it comes to any high powered athletic movement.

A well-designed program to build the foundation of scap and rotator cuff function frees up the prime movers to master the skill movements of the sport. This is essential for performance, but also an important part of injury prevention and longevity of an athlete.

Then why do we have sports specific sections?

The CS Training Zone is in the early stages, delivering a prerequisite to a complete training program. We are actively working with training partners to help hone the sport-specific training and conditioning that’s delivered on our platform.

We are excited to further build the Training Zone to help you reach your training and performance goals!