Crunching sound in shoulder while climbing

Good news! I can climb again!

Saturday my girlfriend and I drove down from Cleveland to Columbus for a concert, and before the show we stopped at the Scioto Audobon Metroparks outdoor climbing wall for a couple hours. After taking a little bit to get back into the groove of roped climbing, I was able to perform near my previous level with only an aching pain in my shoulder. This included a couple of hangs using only my right hand (the injured side).

I'm still going to take climbing slowly, but being able to climb for a couple hours without serious pain makes me feel so much better about it and gives me a bit more confidence in going out to push myself and to start working out again.

Greggle, I hope your shoulder is doing well.

Update...

Last week marked my last PT session with a therapist.

I'm on my own now, doing at home the same exercises and stretches he showed me during our sessions together. These are the most difficult, grueling, and hateful exercises I've ever had the displeasure of doing!

My condition is not any better; I still have the same popping and grinding as I did before. But my shoulder blades are starting to return to their "normal" position, moving closer to the spine. My left shoulder sag is also improving. My left AC joint is still noticeably larger/higher than my right, but hopefully that starts to decrease as all these bits and pieces return to their normal positions, and whatever inflammation subsides. My left shoulder at large sometimes feels more fatigued than my right.

The PT said this could take months to get better. The good news is that I was permitted to climb throughout all of this. As my fear of causing major damage dissipated, I climbed harder and harder. So while the popping and grinding have not gone away, they have not gotten worse with the increase of my climbing volume.

And that's that...

climbing friend,

toughen youself up.

do you even flash?

To EPlumer and the rest for whom this may apply...

Extremely glad you're able to hold weight with your shoulder and climb again. My best advice to you would be to be really cautious about what kind of demand you put on your joint until you know for sure what the issue is. My experience: I dislocated my shoulder snowboarding and, being a dumb kid, popped it back into place and called it a day. Took some OTC NSAIDs and decided to take a few days off of the slopes, but I had heard SO MANY stories of dislocations that I assumed it was a commonplace injury and I would be fine. And I might have been. Except I didn't take it seriously enough and started lifting (heavy) the very next day and was back on the slopes again shortly thereafter. Unknown how things would have worked out had I been more cautious (or, preferably, seen an orthopedist shortly after the initial injury), but a year later it was spontaneously dislocating with very little pressure (as long as the pressure was applied at the right angle). I woke up several times with it out of socket and it even came out one time swimming (that was interesting). Had to have surgery which was painful, expensive, and required an extensive amount of unpleasant, time-consuming PT. It is only through luck that my university's hospital happened to have one of the better orthopedic surgeons in the country and that because of this my shoulder is now at 95%.

In short - shoulders suck. If you damage the labrum (or any of the constructive tissue that forms the "socket" for the ball of your shoulder), it can be weakened but still functional...but if you continue to stress that weakness without proper treatment, it can degrade more and more and more until you finally have a pretty serious problem on your hands.

I sincerely hope whatever is up with your shoulder ISN'T an issue like I had...just want to throw a little caution your way.

To the person who PM'd me about the exercises I do... I don't like that MP automatically sends my email address, and I couldn't find the messaging function MP says doesn't share your email. Yeah, I'm a privacy weenie like that. Moving on...

Here's what you asked for...

Three of the exercises I do can be found here: orthoinfo.org/PDFs/Rehab_Sh…

- External Rotation (Exercises 9 and 17)
- Sleeper Stretch

Google these...
- Ts and Ys on a Swiss ball
- Doorway stretch
- Wall crawl with elastic band, except instead of "crawling" you just slide the pinky-side edge or your arms up the wall in one continuous motion until you get a really good stretch out of it.
- Sword draw