Approaches to Shoulder Support Exercises?

Training Over 35 Lifter
1

When I was 37, I had a minor rotator cuff injury and since then I have been a little obsessive about the feelings in my shoulder - I have clinical OCD BTW which is a fucking nightmare - Anway, I haven’t had any injuries to my shoulders since, but I also want to continue on a shoulder preservation program but not get too exotic; I’ve been doing external rotations x 3 once a week in recent history.

I also warmup my delts, rotators and mid traps before upper body workouts. I’ve also started (today) with another exercise that helps the shoulders, (don’t know name offhand) - flat bench lying down, dumbbells, arms straight up - exercise executed by ONLY contracting the shoulders toward the ceiling, holding it for a second, then the eccentric.

I have seen many articles and exercises about shoulder health, exercises recommended and not recommended; I’ve also found more contradictions than I’d like to.

So with that, what are y’all’s (Southerner’s second person plural possessive with the unusual double apostrophe repped in the Southern version of Merriam Webster) approach to shoulder “support” movements, if any. Too often I get paralysis by analysis when I research this stuff on my own and subsequently feel like I know less than before said research.

2

I’ve seen this before. I really like it. The guy is very knowledgable. Pound for pound perhaps the best article I’ve seen.

http://www.T-Nation.com/readArticle.do?id=1053531

3

Its a little bit off topic from what you are asking here but I would share that
I’ve found that doing bench presses and o/h presses with a limited range of motion has totally “healed” my issue of shoulder impingement which was getting quite bad. I bring the bar down to where my upper arms are parallel with the floor and no lower similar to board presses (except for warmup sets with light weight).

When I do lateral raises I use a modified form with elbows bent, and chest flys are out of the question. Since I am not a competitive pl’er or bb’er I don’t care about passing the lift in front of judges or if my pecs have the perfect shape - but it still allows me to do bp’s and oh presses.

A great shoulder rehab exercise is called turkish get-ups which are really fun to do and add variety to your workouts.