If you’re right-handed, you may have noticed tightness or even pain in your right trapezius muscle (opposite side if you are left-handed). In most cases, the cause is that muscle is compensating for a shoulder rotation problem.
Right-handed electricians extend their right hands to do nearly every task. If you’re making terminal connections in a cabinet, you’re holding a screwdriver or nutdriver in your right hand. Your eyes are in the middle, not aligned with your right hand. So what most of us tend to do is also turn our shoulder toward that center line created by our eyes. We kind of “lean into it,” and in doing so, we rotate the shoulder out of its natural alignment.
When your shoulder is thus rotated, the median deltoid is less involved in lifting your arm, and your trapezius is more involved. The scapula has to slide laterally away from the spine to accommodate this movement. If the movement is sustained or repeated often enough, the connective tissues stretch. Then both the scapula and humerus bone occupy new, mechanically poor positions.
If the shoulder gets rotated far enough, the head of the humerus bone “turns under,” and a condition called “frozen shoulder” occurs. The shoulder is very weak because the median deltoids (shoulder muscles on the side) almost never engage. Over time, the median deltoids experience severe atrophy, and the trapezius nearly always hurts. The individual’s mechanical strength to lift and carry things is impaired. And the person looks lop-sided because the left shoulder has its normal shape while the right shoulder does not.
The good news is it’s not an inescapable hazard of electrical work. A very simple preventive measure involves pushing the shoulder backward. Any physical therapist or chiropractor can show you how to do this, and you don’t need any special equipment. A door jamb works nicely for this purpose.
While standing, put your feet in the doorway and raise your right hand to shoulder level. Now place your palm on the outside face of the doorjamb. Push. You will feel your shoulder move backwards to its “stop position”. Hold for half a minute. You can increase the corrective pressure or range of movement by moving your body deeper into the doorway or twisting at the waist. Depending on how much you are rotating your shoulder forward in the course of your work, you may be fine doing this a few times a week. Or you may want to do it several times a day. The stretch feels good, so you may as well give your left side a hit while you’re at it. If you are like most right-handed people, however, you won’t notice much movement when doing this on the left side.
