Test your Internal Shoulder Rotation – BJJ Movement Screen

At GP we use movement screens to quickly assess your potential risk for injury. We’re kicking off a series of the three most common BJJ movement screens we tend to see grapplers struggle with and in turn find themselves more at risk for common BJJ injuries. To kick it off we’re looking at internal shoulder rotation.

BJJ Movement Screen #1: Test your Shoulder’s Internal Rotation

A lot of neck and shoulder pains lead back to missing internal rotation in the shoulder joint. A common compensation is for the shoulder to ‘dump’ forward creating a slouched position through the mid-back and shoulders and an extension fault at the base of the neck.

Does that sound familiar?

Here’s quick test, or movement screen, to see if your shoulder internal rotation is limited.

If you didn’t do so hot (don’t worry – there are a lot of other jiu jitsu athletes in the same boat) you can improve your shoulder internal rotation by following 3 easy steps:

1. Improve your joint position & mechanics (Mobilization, traction, etc.)
2. Improve your soft tissues limiting the joint (Soft tissue work, PNF, EOR contractions)
3. Activate muscle and challenge nervous system in new ideal range

Want more where this came from? Be sure to head over to our free online workshops & get access to our Common BJJ Injury Movement Screens Workshop. In this workshop we went over this alongside 2 other movement screens to assess your risk level for common BJJ injuries & shared the associated fixes.