Beth says, Lucas, I'm concerned. I'm losing range of motion in my right arm specifically. I believe it's frozen shoulder, but I'm not sure. I haven't taken a fall. I haven't really done anything out of the ordinary. But suddenly, I'm getting pain and I can't lift my arm out to the side past 90 degrees and my front lift is even worse. I think she's referring to shoulder flexion, like arms above your head. How do I know if it's frozen shoulder? Frozen shoulder is a weird one. It's different than something like a rotator cuff tear. It's different than something like a slap tear. It is your, it's called adhesive capsulitis. So Beth, your shoulder joint, your glenohumeral joint where your humerus, your arm bone meets your glenoid fossa, your scapula. It's a cool joint in that you can do a lot of things. It's the most mobile joint in the body. You know this, you can move your arm all around. You can make circles and open to the side and rotate and all these things. It's also very prone to injury because of that great range of motion. Around that joint, we don't ever see this in models or rarely in illustrations, but around that joint is a joint capsule, like all our synovial joints. And that joint capsule in the shoulder in particular is prone to, especially in your 40s, 50s and early 60s, inflammation, pain, stiffness. The joint capsule itself is fibrous, but it's a synovial fluid sack. So imagine your arm bone and your shoulder, your scapula. Imagine you wrapped them in duct tape to keep everything together. Imagine that duct tape was made out of fibery, fleshy, white kind of tissue. That would be your joint capsule. That capsule itself, that's a frozen shoulder. When that capsule itself is chronically inflamed and it can drift to the bursa, the fluid-filled sack. It can drift to your ligaments and other areas, but at least from a starting point, it is that adhesive capsulitis. So that capsule starts getting inflamed and you lose range of motion. A couple of things. It can be correlated with diabetes, thyroid problems, both hyper and hypo autoimmune conditions, other health challenges. It tends to be correlated. It often comes from nowhere. There are three phases. The pain phase is called the freeze phase. And then there is a longer phase where you just lose range of motion and the pain often goes down, but you suddenly can't move. It sounds like that's where you're at. And then what they call the thawing phase when your frozen shoulder starts to thaw. And this is really important that you encourage this thawing phase because loss of range can become long lasting. Cortisone shots, not so effective. Arthroscopic surgery, not so effective. The outcomes are not great. So doctors often will encourage you to do self-care for as long as possible till you've exhausted options. Here's the bad news. Four months would be a fast recovery time, one year, 13 months, pretty typical and up to three years. So it's a frustrating one. Most important things you take your arm through your maximum range of motion without pushing into pain every single day. Why? Well, the same sort of thing would happen in our knees. The same sort of thing would happen in our hips, but because we rely on moving those other synovial joints around so much, we never get into this kind of restricted freezing place where things can really harden up. With your shoulders, it's very easy to limit your range of motion. In fact, many of us move around our entire day with very limited range of motion. And so as time goes on, this can become a lot worse. Long answer. The short summary is you need to keep moving really gently, not pushing into pain, but working through movements in a natural way of a YouTube video specifically about this if you search for frozen shoulder on the Yoga Body YouTube channel. I think you'll find that helpful with a short. It's about a seven minute daily routine that you can do in bed. Thanks for listening to the Lucas Rockwood show. If you enjoy the podcast, I have two asks of you. Number one, share the show on social media with your friends and tag me. My handle is at Lucas Rockwood. Number two is please leave a rating and review in whatever app you're listening on. And last but not least, before you go, if you'd like to be on my mailing list, every week I send out information about the podcast behind the scenes stuff, announcements of online classes and special events, I email about once a week, you can do that at yogabody.com forward slash sign me up. And right now we have a free breathing worksheet on that page as well. That's yogabody.com forward slash sign me up. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next week.