Shoulder pain at work when your job involves lifting or reaching
Nicola Tik
Shoulder pain and physical work often go together, particularly when your job involves lifting, carrying, or working with your arms at or above shoulder height. This article looks at why that combination can be demanding on the shoulder, and what tends to help.
The shoulder is a highly mobile joint, which is part of why it is so useful but also part of why it can be vulnerable under repeated load. When you lift, reach, or carry, the muscles around the shoulder work together to keep the joint stable while it moves. Over a full working day, that repeated effort can leave the area feeling sore, heavy, or stiff.
Overhead and reaching work is particularly demanding because it requires the shoulder to be both stable and mobile at the same time, often under load and often repeatedly. Tasks like stacking, loading, or working at height ask a lot of the joint and the surrounding muscles across a long shift.
You may not be able to change what your job asks of you, but small adjustments to how you approach tasks can reduce unnecessary strain on the shoulder.
Where possible, try to keep loads close to your body when carrying rather than extended out to the side or in front. This reduces the lever effect on the shoulder joint. When reaching overhead, try to position yourself so that you are reaching up rather than up and across, which tends to load the shoulder at a more manageable angle.
If you are doing repeated overhead tasks, taking short breaks between sets of that movement where your role allows can help the shoulder muscles recover before fatigue sets in.
Shoulder stiffness that builds up over a working week often responds well to gentle movement. The goal is to keep the joint mobile without loading it further.
A few gentle shoulder circles in a comfortable range, or slow arm swings by your side, can help the area stay mobile without adding to the demand it has already been meeting at work. Many people find that doing this in the evening or before a shift helps the shoulder feel less loaded over the course of the week.
Strengthening the muscles around the shoulder over time can also help the joint manage the demands of physical work more effectively. This does not need to be complicated. Simple exercises that build endurance in the shoulder and upper back tend to be more useful for physically demanding jobs than heavy loading.
If you would like to try a guided stretch for the shoulder, VIDA has a short video you can follow at your own pace.
If your shoulder is in a flare-up, it is worth adjusting the load where you can rather than working through it without any changes. That might mean asking a colleague to take on overhead tasks for a day or two, or being more deliberate about keeping loads close to your body. Flare-ups do settle, and a few days of adjusted activity can make a meaningful difference to how quickly that happens.