What Does a Torn Rotator Cuff Feel Like?
Key takeaways:
A torn rotator cuff is a common cause of shoulder pain in adults.
It can happen when you injure the group of muscles and tendons that hold the shoulder joint in place.
People who’ve experienced it say the pain ranges from dull ache to the feeling of a knife stuck in your shoulder.
Athletes can attest to how a common injury, a torn rotator cuff, can be a game-ender.
When you injure the muscles and tendons that hold your shoulder in place, it can make it difficult to move your arm. While a torn rotator cuff is common among athletes, it’s also common in the general, over-40 population because of injury or wear and tear. About 2 million Americans experience some type of rotator-cuff problem each year.
For those who have experienced this shoulder injury, the pain can range from a dull ache to the feeling of a knife stuck in your shoulder. Here’s how three people describe it.
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A softball player brought to tears by his injury
Branden Payton was reaching for a home-run ball when his injury happened.
Instead of catching the softball, he hit his shoulder on a fence post. And he immediately felt intense pain and couldn't lift his arm.
At first, his teammates thought that he had dislocated his shoulder. But it was still in position. Thirty minutes later, his arm and fingers were tingling, and he still hadn’t regained the ability to lift his arm. One teammate suggested that Branden had torn his rotator cuff, and that it might have come away from the bone.
On a scale of 1 to 10, “the pain was at about a 9.5,” Branden says. “I couldn’t raise my arm and fingers, and my elbow began tingling.”
Branden — an information technology director in Huber Heights, Ohio — didn’t go to the doctor at first. He pushed through the pain. He even went to a softball tournament 3 days later. During the tournament, he didn’t play in the first game but was able to run bases the next day with minimal discomfort, if he held his arm a certain way.
The evening after he ran bases, he was in his hotel room and instinctively reached his arm out to grab a falling towel. The movement was so painful that it brought him to tears.
He made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon. And a scan confirmed that he had torn his rotator cuff and that it had separated from the bone. So he had surgery a couple of months later.
Today, Branden is back in the game, and he’s noticing improvements in flexibility and his ability to throw.
For a bodybuilder, shoulder pain cut like a knife
For Kimmie Thorne, a 58-year-old personal trainer and online fitness coach in Apache Junction, Arizona, a shoulder tear was a blow to her athleticism — at least temporarily.
She had just won first place in the Wings of Strength female bodybuilding competition when it happened. She had been counting down the weeks leading up to a national competition and then she tore her rotator cuff doing a routine dumbbell shoulder press.
“I heard an audible pop. Pain shot down my right arm, and I knew right away that I tore my rotator cuff,” Kimmie says. “By the next morning, I could not lift my arm. The pain was horrific. The weakness was shocking, and it radiated down my arm.
“It feels like there’s a knife permanently stuck in your shoulder.”
Instead of having surgery, she opted for biologics and stem cell therapy. And she did 3 months of physical therapy.
As she recovered, she used her injury to help motivate others to get moving again, she says. But, for a while, her rotator-cuff injury affected her quality of life and every upper-body move she made.
A public-speaking coach learned the danger of ‘no pain, no gain’
Former TV journalist Tom Cobin, who is now a public-speaking coach in Florida, was familiar with rotator-cuff-rehabilitation exercises from dislocating his right shoulder decades ago.
Nearly 20 years after his first shoulder injury, he was lifting weights on a workout bench when he damaged his right glenoid labrum — a part of the shoulder that provides stability and shock absorption within the joint. He started doing what he thought were the correct exercises, but he ended up further injuring his rotator cuff.
While he didn’t completely sever the tendon, his specialist felt surgery was necessary to improve shoulder function.
Tom says his big lesson was: “In the gym, you do not want to go by the general saying of ‘no pain, no gain.’ Pain should be confined to the muscles. If you feel joint pain, you need to get that checked immediately.”
He points out that the muscles around your rotator cuff keep your shoulder joint stable. And, when those smaller muscles are not strengthened to keep the joint stable when you’re working larger muscles, that is often when you get injured.
What does the doctor say?
Patricia Pinto-Garcia, MD, MPH
Medical Editor
The shoulder is the joint that connects the humerus (arm bone), scapula, and clavicle. Muscles, tendons, and ligaments come together at the shoulder to hold these bones in place. This allows you a wide range of movement. But that freedom of movement comes at a cost: stability.
Other joints in the body don’t move in so many directions, so they’re held together more firmly. But your shoulder isn’t, which makes it more prone to injuries, like a torn rotator cuff.
Rotator-cuff injuries include any damage to the ligaments, muscles, tendons, and labrum at the shoulder. Every injury is different, as is what people experience from an injury. A smaller tear might mean your movement is less limited than someone who had a complete tear, for example.
Several large nerves run through the shoulder. If you have a rotator-cuff tear, damaged muscles can pull on those nerves, causing irritation and damage. That can lead to symptoms like numbness and tingling in your arm and hand.
Everyone with a rotator-cuff injury experiences pain. Some people experience pain all of a sudden, while others experience a slow buildup over time. But the pain intensity isn’t always related to the degree of the injury.
If you feel pain in your shoulder, get it checked out. Identifying a rotator-cuff injury early allows you to start treatment right away. Early treatment gives you the best chance at full recovery.
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