My idea, at least, is to try to improve strength in all planes of motion. The problem for the shoulders, of course, is that there are infinite planes of motion. I've been doing my current set of practices for about 6 months (I started around the time COVID stuff started), main things are:
- Overhead reaching/stretching
- Shoulder dislocates
- Pushups & dips
- Bodyweight rows (started on a bar, recently transitioned to rings)
- Behind-the-back reaching (trying to touch the shoulder blade with opposite hand, above and below shoulder)
The real goal is to be able to do things I enjoy and be pain free. The two things I enjoy that seem to be periodic shoulder pain triggers are volleyball and high-volume KB snatches.
As far as what works... it's always hard to say if preventive measures are working. When you aren't in pain, there's no way to know if that's because of your preventative measures, or because of something else entirely. All I can say for a fact at the moment is that it hasn't been 100% effective - I still periodically am subject to shoulder pain.
But with that said - I do think it's improved. Again hard to say because I haven't logged data diligently on this, but it does seem to me that back in the winter and early spring, I would have more bouts of post-volleyball shoulder pain, that would last a little longer (took more than 1 day to feel normal again). In the last 6 months that doesn't seem to be the case... I can only recall a couple of incidents, and none of them last more than 1 day - 2 of them only lasted the next morning. Probably that says that I should take specific action to log incidents and duration.
So... I think it's working... just not as well/quickly as the core work I've been doing for my back (bridges, hanging leg raises, twisting). My back has been feeling great since healing up from the last TSC (knock on wood).
I'm thinking, particularly for volleyball, I would probably benefit from adding some rotator-cuff-focused movements. So I was looking into getting some bands. But at the same time, my training sessions are really too long already...