Frozen Shoulder Explained

[00:00:00][music] >> When I was a kid, as most kids do, I liked making funny faces. Some of them made my family laugh, but some of them, I remember, were not very popular with my parents. [music] I would torque my lips into a crooked line, push my eyebrows into a twisted mess, cross my eyes as hard as I could, and stick my tongue out. And both of my parents would offer me a stern warning.

[00:00:23]If I kept doing it, my face would freeze like that.

[00:00:27]I remember thinking, "Really? Like, would that really happen?"

[00:00:31]And then, I think some kid at school told some tale of a friend's sister's best friend whose face really did freeze like that. Clearly, this wasn't the truth. It was obviously just a way to get us to stop being weird in public.

[00:00:44]Faces don't freeze. But, as I age and look back at this parenting tactic, I realized that while my mom might have been wrong about the face, she wasn't wrong about the mechanism. Because things do freeze. Not from a single held expression, but more from the slow accumulation of held positions. Patterns repeated often enough will train the tissues. In the same way that reps build strength at the gym, stagnation eventually becomes interpreted not as temporary, but as the new normal.

[00:01:17]And nowhere in the body is this more true, more literal, and more anatomically documented than the shoulder.