I havent boxed let alone done much highly physical activity in the past year in regards to sports and I just started boxing again.. It's about a week and a half since I started again and my shoulder (left) starts hurting after high amounts of activity.. Like say, a lot of punches being thrown, or when I put force behind the punch numerous times. I'm guessing this could be my rotator cuff? Or other muscles around that area. Has anyone else experienced this pain/soreness? What are some good exercises/drills to strengthen your rotators cuff and surrounding muscles? Thanks
Way too many years ago I was training and boxing amateur. I suffered some shoulder injuries, mostly when throwing left hooks and either missing or getting countered in the upper body while throwing the punch. It led to several shoulder separations and I was diagnosed with this official sounding injury-------a "Hills-Sachs Lesion of the Left Humeral Head". Mostly, it meant I had a penchant for my left shoulder to dislocate from time to time. Quite painful when it happens and it puts an end to training for a few weeks. The reason I mention this is to alert you to other possibilities for your shoulder pain. I would sometimes suffer with this pain just from over exertion of the joint because of its deterioration. Hopefully, this is not your problem.
Some type of acid builds up in your muscles when not working out and that´s one reason for the pain. Overworking is another one. I did not workout for over a year and did some wrestling. My whole body was in pain. I could barely move myself the following morning and the pain lasted in my legs for a whole week.
That acid you are referring to is called lactic acid and it builds up when working out fairly strenuously. It is more prevalent when you haven't worked out for a while and try to do too much initially. It does lessen if you have a good program to follow and do it on a regular basis. Good advice is to start slow and light and work your way up in weight or intensity. You see this all the time in fitness centers where guys come in for the first few visits and believes they're Mr. Universe and almost kill themselves with the weights. Then you hardly see them again because they overdid it and lose interest. As for working out on a heavy bag shooting jabs, hooks and straight shots, cut the time down to a minute or two each round and not go full bore when just getting started. That's a lot of shock to your joints if you haven't done it in a while or your technique is not good.
Make sure you do exercises to work on the small muscles of your upper back. Boxing is mainly push motions, and you need to work on pull motions for balance. If your shoulders get overdeveloped, they will start to roll forward, and it's easy to injure yourself that way. I learnt the hard way, I had to do a few weeks of physio for my right shoulder. Rotator cuff exercises, back flies with a resistence band, etc.
When you punch, punch straight forward as opposed to shooting the punch up as if your fighting a taller opponent, My shoulder dislocated on me a grip of times and I realize I start getting pains when I jab shooting up. There's nothing you can do really after a dislocation, I just try my best in stretching it out, getting my shoulder warm and doing lots of resistance bands workouts to strengthen it.
The first time my shoulder dislocated on me was during a street fight, and it was because i threw my jab and it ricochet up off his right fist when he tried to throw his punch. **** popped out the socket and I had to philly roll my happy ass into a Lost
Shoulders are scary man. Get it checked. Like Gumbo said, a seemingly annoying pain can really be a tear that is slowly destroying your joint. Especially since you didn't mention sore hands or elbows or other general pain it might be joint specific rather than work related.
Exact signs of ligament damage... Especially after something like a heavy lift of cracking off balance punch.
