Do Rounded Shoulders Limit Your Range of Motion?

Short answer: Yes.

To see for yourself, do this quick test:

Hunch forward, rounding your shoulders forward, and attempt to lift your arms as high as you can. Note how far they go.

Now open your chest, lightly squeeze your shoulder blades together, and again lift your arms as high as you can.
See the difference?

In today’s age of constant screen time, many people have a rather constant rounded-shoulder-posture. From just a quick test, it seems that rounded shoulders can affect shoulder range of motion quite significantly, so let’s go over the details.

 This article will cover:

1.     What are rounded shoulders

2.     What causes rounded shoulders

3.     How rounded shoulders decrease your usable range of motion

4.     How to fix rounded shoulders

1.     What Are Rounded Shoulders:

If you didn’t do the quick test in the beginning, you should do it now. It’s best if you feel and see it for yourself.

First, squeeze your shoulder blades together and try to push them down into your back pockets.

That’s the “proper posture”.

Now relax your shoulders and then lean your head forward like you’re looking at a computer screen.

Take note of how your shoulders look now, they should be rounded forward. That’s the posture many people sustain for hours a day.

Though no specific posture is inherently good or bad in itself, there can be pitfalls depending on your goals.

2.     What Causes Rounded Shoulders

Besides being genetically born with thoracic kyphosis or another pathology that you can’t change, here are three modifiable factors that contribute to rounded shoulders.

Modifiable Factor 1: Posture and Neurodynamic Control

Though many people typically round their shoulders much of the day, they aren’t automatically destined to have forever rounded shoulders.

In fact, most people can still assume a neutral shoulder position and have good potential for full shoulder motion.

That being said, the more your practice something, the better you get at it, and vice versa. For this reason, the more time spent in a rounded shoulder posture, the more natural it becomes. The less time spent with shoulders back and torso erect, the less natural it becomes.

Over time, the ability to squeeze the shoulder blades together and keep an erect torso become much harder as your muscles don’t know how to do it as they rarely practice it.

This creates a sort of feedback loop in the brain. Rounded shoulders starts to become your new normal such that you may feel straight and upright even when you are not.

Modifiable Factor 2: Limited Pectoral Flexibility and/or Pectoral Dominance

Your pectorals (major and minor) run from the front of your scapula, clavicle, and sternum to the front of your humerus. If they shorten, they tend to draw your shoulders forward.

To visualize this, take one hand and put the thumb on your opposite clavicle and the middle finger on your bicep. That’s the direction the pectorals run.

Now, keeping your two fingers glued to your body, move your thumb towards your bicep. This simulates the shortening/contracting of your pecs.

What happens to your shoulders? They round forward.

It’s easy to see that if your pecs were perpetually shortened, your shoulders would be perpetually rounded.

How do pectorals become tight to begin with? There are two main reasons.

First is via sustained posture, as mentioned above. Sitting with rounded shoulders all day keeps the pecs shortened, all day. If they aren’t stretched out regularly, they become stiff and short.

Second is via pectoral dominance. If all you do for upper body workouts are horizontal pushing movements (push ups and bench presses) while neglecting pulling exercises to work your back (rows and pull ups) your pecs become dominant over your back.

Like a tug of war, the pecs win, pulling your shoulders forward, yet again.

Modifiable Factor 3: Limited Thoracic Mobility

This factor is quite direct in causing rounded shoulders.

The thoracic spine is essentially the spine of the upper back. Generally, stiffening of the thoracic spine is associated with kyphosis, which is the accentuated rounding forward of the spine.

It’s no surprise that when the upper back rounds forward, the shoulders follow.

How does the thoracic mobility decline? Most often it’s due to disuse and not enough movement through the area.

How often do you work twisting motions of the upper body? How often do you work extension motions of the upper body? Even if we throw out the word “work”, how often do you ever twist or extend your upper back. Usually, not very often.

As those positions aren’t used and the body remains stagnant, the thoracic spine stiffens and accentuates its already forward curve.

The shoulders then follow.

3.     How rounded shoulders decrease your usable range of motion

Straight to the point:

Rounded shoulders, over time, cause detrimental scapular kinematics that reduce your range of motion and even cause shoulder pain.

Scapular movement is essential to full shoulder range of motion. With a stationary scapula, the humerus can move only 120 degrees into flexion, like when you reach for something on top of your sedan.

The additional shoulder range of motion comes from the upward rotation of your scapula. As it upwardly rotates, the acromion moves out of the way, allowing further humeral movement.

Without the scapula’s upward rotation, the acromion would block the humerus from moving, reducing shoulder range of motion and causing pain if you tried to force through it.

What does this have to do with rounded shoulders?

A study by Kebaetse M, McClure P, and Pratt NE looked at the effect of rounded shoulders on shoulder range of motion and strength. They found that a slouched postures (rounded shoulders) significantly decreased shoulder range of motion and strength at 90 degrees.

Essentially, when you round your shoulders forward, you alter your scapular kinematics and prevent the scapula from upwardly rotating, effectively blocking your humerus from moving further.

4.     How to fix rounded shoulders

How to fix rounded shoulders depends on what’s causing them.

Can you get out of the rounded shoulder position by squeezing your shoulder blades together? If you can’t even get out of the hunched position, you need to see a medical professional.

If you can get out of the rounded position, does it feel natural or unnatural?

If natural, then just spend some time throughout the day occasionally trying to squeeze your shoulder blades together. If unnatural, need to determine why.

If you are spending ALL day in that hunched position, you need to try and spend more time OUT of that position as well as perform some corrective exercises.

Good exercises include lying on your back on a foam roller for 5-10 minutes (foam roller running along your spine), shoulder squeezes, rows, pull ups, supine pull overs with a light dowel, y’s, and t’s.

These exercises are also great to do if you have tight or dominant pectorals. However, in that case, you also need to stretch your pecs daily.

To have the biggest effect, you should do you pec stretches BEFORE the back exercises. This allows you gain a new range of motion via the stretches and then repetitively push/practice that range via the active exercises. If you performed your exercises before the stretches, you would be pushing/practicing through a smaller range.

To increase thoracic mobility, your best bet is to start with some exercises like open books, kneeling open books, quadruped thoracic rotation, lumbar locked thoracic rotation, and seated thoracic rotation and side bend. Pick one or two that you like and stick with them on a rather daily basis.

That about covers it.

We hope you had a great read and can apply some of this knowledge to the real world for real results.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

As always, stay functional, stay fit, and bulletproof your body.

Best,

Renegade Rehab

Why You Should Never Read Just the Headline

Headline facts.

They’re the “facts” you get from only reading headlines. Almost all of us are guilty of it.

If you’ve ever used Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, it’s almost guaranteed to have happened. You read a headline someone posted about, but not the actual article, and later repeat the headline as truth.

Often times, if you had read the article, you’d have realized the original headline skewed or misinterpreted the facts. Whether it be malintent or incompetence, the end results remains the same: misinformation.

Most of the time this is done for clickbait purposes, to drive traffic to journalists’ articles and make money. However, incorrect headline facts can happen with science as well.

Results from low quality, flawed, or irrelevant studies can be presented as headline facts to the casual observer – if you read the original study, you realize the headline presented the findings incorrectly.

Why is this important?

Because when you read headlines about studies, especially when researching information to help heal your body (as we deal with), you must realize the headline is NOT the full picture and may, in fact, lead you astray.

An example:

While researching the best and newest evidence for treating shin splints to incorporate into our app’s tailored rehab protocols, we came across a meta-analysis and systematic review (cream of the crop of evidence that combines other pieces of evidence together for big conclusions) that stated for shin splints: “Weekly mileage was not a risk factor based on pooled data from 2 studies.”

This blanket statement seemed counterintuitive as shin splints are inherently an overuse injury, so mileage SHOULD matter. Usually the results from research papers like this are valid. However, due to the nature of the statement, we needed more information.

After diving into one of the actual studies, we concluded that the statement was neither accurate nor standing on a solid foundation of evidence, primarily for 3 reasons: running mileage was self-reported, the majority of the participants were cross country runners, and the population did not represent the general population.

The second of the two studies the statement above was based from was very similar in nature, so for simplicity’s sake we’ll talk about just one.

Reason 1: The mileage was self-reported.

The participants in the study were all division 1 and division 2 athletes at a single college. The sports were: cross country, track and field, soccer, tennis, volleyball, and cheer. The authors collected data, including weekly mileage, at the beginning of the season, then waited to see who developed shin splints during the season.

The big problem was how the mileage was collected: by self-report. Cross country athletes would know exactly their mileage, but soccer, cheer, and tennis? How many miles did they run in a game, match, or practice? Extremely hard to know, let alone estimate on the spot on a questionnaire for researchers. This leads to over and underestimations that skew the data and thus the results.

Reason 2: The majority of the participants were cross country runners.

Of the 146 athletes, 74 were cross country runners. They are, of course, notorious for running extremely large weekly mileages, especially compared to tennis, cheer, and volleyball.

At the end of the study, when there were two groups (one group that developed shin splints and the other that did not), the cross country athletes made up about half of both groups. Because they run so much more than the other groups, their large mileages would heavily outweigh the other participants’ mileages. Since there were also equal ratios of cross country runners between the two groups, you would expect the averages to be equal as well.

Well, they were.

However, since the average weekly mileage was the same between the group that stayed healthy and the group that got shin splints, the statement was made that mileage didn’t matter with shin splints, based on that exact data.

Now we hope you see why a technically true statement about a single study can be off-base from reality.

Reason 3: The population does not represent the general population

Though we know the flaws in the study design, lets, for a second, grant that the statement “mileage doesn’t matter” in this study was actually valid. What would that even mean?

It could ONLY mean that mileage does not matter for that specific population: 20-year-old college athletes. Is that the general population? NO, so you cannot generalize the results as such. However, as the meta-analysis states “weekly mileage was not a risk factor”, it does not specify the population type. Instead the meta-analysis only noted it was based on data from two studies. It would have been up to you (and us) to look into the exact data the claim was based off of.

But, honestly, how many people take the time to comb through original pieces of research? This is how headline facts can make their way into science, and into your own life.

End example.

So why are we writing this and why do you care?

Because when it comes to your body, you need to do what’s ACTUALLY good for it. You don’t want to start running endless miles because you think mileage doesn’t relate to shin splints.

You don’t want to headline fact your health.

You need to either look into the research yourself or use resources from those that have. In this case, we can be that resource. For daily prevention of injuries to tailored rehab programs, we look into the details to ensure the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. We ensure you are getting appropriate and good rehab and prehab programs for your body.

Whatever you choose to do, just don’t be a headliner. Stay functional, stay fit, and build healthy habits using solid evidence to lead a more productive life.

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References:

Hubbard TJ, Carpenter EM, Cordova ML. Contributing factors to medial tibial stress syndrome: a prospective investigation. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2009;41(3):490-496.

Reinking MF, Austin TM, Richter RR, Krieger MM. Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome in Active Individuals: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Risk Factors. Sports Health. 2017;9(3):252-261.

Renegade Rundown: Shin Splints

In this article, we cover:

1.     What are shin splints

2.     What puts you at risk for shin splints

3.     How to treat shin splints

4.     How long recovery takes

5.     Why people keep getting shin splints

6.     How our app can help you improve your shin splints

1.     What Are Shin Splints: 

Shin splints are one of the most common injuries athletes develop, occurring in about 16-25% of all runners.

However, despite how common they are, their cause is still debated.

Different studies have shown different underlying reasons. Some declare shin splints are caused by the breakdown and pain of fascia whereas others have found bone overload and repair inability to be the issue. In fact, even imaging cannot differentiate between those that have shin splints and those that do not.

Since shin splints, more formally known as medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS), cannot yet be diagnosed by imaging, they are diagnosed by clinical presentation.

Thus, MTSS is defined as:

Exercise induced pain located along the posteromedial tibial border (the insides of your shin bones) with pain upon palpation of that border for ≥5 consecutive centimeters.

You won’t have any swelling, cramping/burning pain, numbness, or tingling with only MTSS. If you do, it’s generally something else.

2.     What Puts You At Risk For Shin Splints:

 No matter the exact cause, the breakdown of tissue and lack of recovery are due to overuse that can be compounded and made worse with certain risk factors. Specifically, you have an increased risk for developing MTSS if you:

·      Are female

·      Have a heavier bodyweight

·      Have an increased navicular drop (think flat foot and decreased strength/control)

·      Have a previous running injury

·      Have greater hip ER with hip in flexion (think decreased hip mobility and control)

·      Have fewer years experience in sport

Some of these risk factors can be changed, like heavier body weight and greater hip external rotation. Unfortunately, others can’t, like being female and having a previous running injury.

3.     How to Treat Shin Splints:

Now that you know what MTSS is, how do you treat it?

Unfortunately, the evidence here isn’t great. Systematic reviews (papers that summarize the results of many studies) show that things like lower leg bracing, gait training, rest, ice massage, electrical stimulation therapy, injections, stretching and strengthening, and graded running programs all are of pretty low evidence and not strongly supported for MTSS treatment.

What then, should you do?

In cases like this, where the evidence isn’t strong for treatments, you stick to the facts and the basics.

MTSS is a load intolerance issue due, in the end, to overuse. Other risk factors may make you more likely to develop it (like being overweight), but they themselves don’t cause it.

The best course of action would be appropriately, and slowly, loading the area. Concurrently, you need to ensure proper education on MTSS (like what you’re doing right now) and understand the recovery process.

4.     How Long Does Recovery Take:

It takes about 3 months before patients who have had chronic MTSS are able to run 20 minutes continuously with minimal pain at a moderate pace. However, for more athletic and higher volume activities, it may take up to 9-12 months to return to sport from shin splints.

This is often much longer than people expect. Unfortunately, expectations don’t affect reality and when people try to return to sport and activity sooner, they often relapse.

5.     Why People Keep Getting Shin Splints:

During the recovery process, careful loading is crucial. Often, loading is added too fast too soon and pain returns with increased intensity. Again, knowing and avoiding this is extremely important. Generally, increasing volume of non-painful activity 10-30% or less per week has been shown to work well without aggravating symptoms.

Why does loading/exercising work when loading was the original problem?

Movement helps to restore strength, structure, and integrity to damaged tissues (like muscle and bone) as it stimulates healing, blood flow, and tensile organization. However, there is a sweet spot. Overloading the tissue will break it down faster than the body can repair. Not loading the tissue enough for extended periods will cause less healing and more degeneration due to the “use it or lose it” principle.

This is why only resting does not work, simply continuing to workout as usual does not work, and only resting and then going straight back to your usual volume does not work.

The tissue needs to be reloaded slowly and appropriately.

6.     How We Can Help:

Your best bet for helping your shin splints would be to visit a local physical therapist. However, if you do not have the time, money, or inclination to do so, we welcome you to utilize our tailored rehab programs in our app, Renegade Rehabilitation. In the case of shin splints, you’d use our ankle programs.

After filling out a serious of questions to inform us about your specific pain and situation, we create a tailored program for you, going through the exact process just described.

We tell you exactly what to do for each day, sets and reps, and show you how to do each exercise. We guide you through the natural phases of your body’s healing and progress you to increased loads and intensities. We also help strengthen your body’s other weak points, helping fix some of the risk factors for MTSS noted above in an effort to prevent long term reoccurrence!

Coupled with a smart walking/running progression program and good education on the topic (already done!), we believe the Renegade Rehabilitation app is instrumental in helping you get rid of your shin splints and, more importantly, keeping them from returning!

References:

Reinking MF, Austin TM, Richter RR, Krieger MM. Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome in Active Individuals: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Risk Factors. Sports Health. 2017;9(3):252-261.

Moen MH, Tol JL, Weir A et al (2009) Medial tibial stress syndrome: a critical review. Sports Med 39:523–546

Mulvad B, Nielsen RO, Lind M, Ramskov D (2018) Diagnoses and time to recovery among injured recreational runners in the RUN CLEVER trial. PLoS ONE 13(10):e204742

Winters M. The diagnosis and management of medial tibial stress syndrome : An evidence update. Unfallchirurg. 2020;123(Suppl 1):15-19.

Do Prevention Exercises Reduce Injury Risk?

Though it may seem like common sense that mobility and strengthening work would reduce risk of injury (we offer it in our app after all), you should never take something as a truth just because it sounds like it would be true. ALWAYS do the research. We know you’re busy, so we went ahead and did it for you.

 So do “prevention exercise sessions” reduce risk of injury? Was the common sense correct after all?

It turns out…yes, yes it was. The research backs it up, for practically every joint in your body. Strengthening, improving proprioception (body awareness), and increasing mobility will help reduce your risk of future injury. BUT, things are more complicated than that.

Improving only the area of concern is often not enough to enact significant change. Instead, you need to look both above and below the area, throughout your “kinetic chain” (a fancy way of describing how body parts play roles in affecting other, farther away body parts).

For example, Arundale et al. found that “exercise-based knee injury prevention programs in women that include proximal control exercises, such as trunk/core strengthening and stability exercises, led to significantly lower ACL injury rates... In contrast, programs that did not include proximal control exercises did not reduce injury rates”.

But…why?

Sometimes injuries at one muscle or joint are the result of weaknesses across the body, not necessarily at the specified area. In order to mitigate risk injury, you need to perform a comprehensive prevention program – you ensure every muscle and joint has the appropriate strength and mobility to function accordingly.

This may be easier explained with an example.

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Let’s say that over time, due to disuse and compensation, you develop weak hip abductors (the muscles on the outside of your hips). One of their main jobs is stabilizing your limb when you stand on one leg (every time you take a step) or when landing from a jump. With every step you take, your outside hip musculature works to prevent you from tipping over. If you perform athletics, you often use jumping as a tool for improvement. When you land, your hips have to work to keep your lower extremity from collapsing inward. Both of these can create a consistent and/or large amount of force for the hips to handle.

If you hips are weak you’ll get what is called a “hip drop” and “dynamic valgus”. If you watch someone walking with a hip drop, you do literally see their hips drop down with each step. In terms of jumping and landing, you’ll see the knees fall inward as the hips are unable to stabilize the femur. Most of the time an affected person has no idea it’s happening because there is no immediate pain associated with it.

The problem with the hip drop and dynamic valgus is what those actions do to your knees. Normally the knee joint is straight and aligned to create symmetric and stacked forces. If your knees are constantly falling inward due to hip weakness, they not only have to endure increased forces to pick up the slack of your weak hips, they have to do so in an abnormal and asymmetric joint position.

As you might guess, with step after step and landing after landing, a lot of stress on the knees can build up. With enough time, you’ll develop knee pain even though the root of the problem is the hips.

End example.

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Now back to daily prevention programs.

More comprehensive, preventative programs are better for reducing injury risk than less comprehensive. Arundale et al. found that programs that include both strengthening and plyometrics are better than either alone for reducing ACL injury rate, and that work on proprioception also helps reduce the risk.

Thorborg et al. found that the between two programs aimed at reducing all injuries in soccer players, the more comprehensive and all-inclusive program had significant reduction in injuries whereas the less comprehensive had no effect! This is why our programs are comprehensive, even if some people don’t like it: it’s better.

Last point.

Turns out, simply doing exercises every-once-in-a-while does NOT help reduce injury. 

Hammes et al. found that performing a comprehensive prevention program focused primarily on the lower extremity just one time per week did NOT reduce the risk of injuries (like hamstring strains) in soccer players. However, in a systematic review, Al et al. found that when using such programs that included eccentric hamstring strengthening (like the Nordic hamstring curl), on a more daily basis with higher compliance, hamstring injuries were cut in half. This is just one of many examples (like how Arundale et al. found that athletes who performed knee prehab and prevention exercises for a longer period of time, more times per week, and with higher compliance had significantly decreased knee ACL injuries compared to those that didn’t).

Basically: Do the work, get the results.

What does this mean for you?

One day every now and then is NOT enough. That’s why we named our Daily Prevention follow along videos just that, DAILY, and why we made everything available on an app, so you have NO excuse not to do it. All you have to do is play copycat for 10 minutes a day. But don’t waste your time thinking you are doing yourself a positive benefit and reducing injury risk if you are only going to do your exercises once a week. Commit to a healthier body, for both current you and future you.

References:

Al Attar WSA, Soomro N, Sinclair PJ, Pappas E, Sanders RH. Effect of Injury Prevention Programs that Include the Nordic Hamstring Exercise on Hamstring Injury Rates in Soccer Players: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Med. 2017;47(5):907-916.

Arundale AJH, Bizzini M, Giordano A, et al. Exercise-Based Knee and Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury Prevention. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther. 2018;48(9):A1-A42.

Hammes D, Aus der Funten K, Kaiser S, Frisen E, Bizzini M, Meyer T. Injury prevention in male veteran football players - a randomised controlled trial using "FIFA 11+". J Sports Sci. 2015;33(9):873-881. 

Thorborg K, Krommes KK, Esteve E, Clausen MB, Bartels EM, Rathleff MS. Effect of specific exercise-based football injury prevention programmes on the overall injury rate in football: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the FIFA 11 and 11+ programmes. Br J Sports Med. 2017;51(7):562-571. 

The Four Stages of Icing

Right as you place a bag of ice on your skin, you feel it. But what exactly is it that you feel, and why does it change? Is what you’re feeling normal? Here are the four stages of what you should feel as you ice a body part and how long each stage lasts. 

Stage 1: Cold

This is the immediate sensation you feel when you apply the ice. It’s unpleasant, but something we all know and can generally deal with. This phase usually lasts from minutes 1-3. 

Stage 2: Burning

The “Cold” feeling will eventually grow stronger and more unpleasant as it builds in intensity to a burning type sensation. This is when most people want to give up as it is the least comfortable. This phase lasts from minutes 3-5, so don’t give up, it won’t last that long! 

Stage 3: Aching

As the intensity begins to subside, the burning will be replaced with an aching type feeling. You’ve made it over the hump! Any sort of unpleasant feelings should only continue to decrease. It will still be uncomfortable, but this stage lasts from minutes 5-7. 

Stage 4: Numbness

The last stage in the icing saga is blissful numbness. This stage signals you have neared the finish line. After about 7 minutes you’ll have numbness. Don’t ice for longer than 20 minutes at any one time and allow for at least 30 minutes between sessions for your tissues to rewarm.   

So that’s it! To remember these stages, you can use the acronym CBAN. If your feelings differ from these stages, there may be a reason (like if you have Raynaud’s as I do), but you should check with your doctor to ensure it’s nothing serious.  

Pain vs Injury

Pain sucks. No one really likes it. Why do we feel it then? Well, pain is helpful in keeping us alive. Evolutionarily, it’s been advantageous to not do things that hurt. Cutting your foot on a rock, breaking a bone, or burning your hand in a fire are all actions that, if we kept doing, would eventually kill us. Pain is a warning system of potential danger, injury, and/or disease. In that way, it’s much like the alarm system on a house. However, just like with any alarm, problems happen. In the body, these problems occur when our pain alarm goes off again and again when there is not actually any injury.

Just like when you hurt your back, knee, shoulder, or ankle and you feel pain, when a rock breaks through a house window, the alarm blares. Something breaks so the alarm system lets us know. Normally the tissues in our back heal (we hire someone to fix our window) so the alarm system eventually turns off. However, sometimes the repair process takes a bit longer than normal and the alarm system consistently rings, rings, rings, and rings again. We develop a more chronic type of pain. The alarm rings so much that it gets used to ringing and becomes sensitized, even as the window is being fixed.

When the window, and our back, is eventually entirely healed, the alarm system isn’t what it used to be. Because the alarm is now so sensitized, it will blare at even the slightest of touches. All you have to do is rattle the window, tap on the frame, or toss a pebble for the alarm to sound. The window hasn’t actually been damaged, in fact it’s perfectly fine, but the alarm is triggered nonetheless. In our body, movements we have previously and constantly associated with pain (standing on our ankle, bending over, or reaching overhead) may continue to cause pain despite no longer having an injury.

This often happens when we have chronic, long lasting pain, especially during stressful times when all of our senses are on high alert. The pain system in our body can become sensitized to the point that we still feel pain long after our tissues have healed. So what can we do about it?

First, you should visit a physical therapist to ensure this is indeed your situation and nothing else is going on. Then you will be prescribed progressive and specific movements that will increase your mobility and strength while calming down your pain system. What you can do yourself, and what you will be educated on, is reducing your stress and changing your relationship with movement and pain. Added stress in your life continues to sensitize your pain system, keeping it blaring with just a tap on the window. Reducing stress will desensitize and reset the alarm to normal.

It’s also important to see and believe that your body (the window) is actually strong and healthy and not simply take our word on it. If you believe that the window is fixed, the next time the alarm goes off with a little tap, you’ll know it’s nothing to worry about. To do this, a physical therapist will “show” you, through various movements and activities, that your body is indeed healthy. However, this is not usually an easy task. For so long your alarm system has worked fantastically, so it’s hard believe it’s wrong. It’s extremely difficult to solve this issue without guidance and assurance. So if you’ve had pain for a long time, have had an increase in stress, and/or have pain that doesn’t seem to be getting better, you should get it checked with Physical Therapy and then use the house and alarm experts over at Renegade Rehab.