Deltoid injury?

[OakLeaf]

Hope you can get it completely resolved.

Just a word of warning, I know your injury is nothing like mine, but I think one thing we have in common is that after things have been out of alignment for a long time, there's no one "key." The pec minor might indeed be the key to its own particular layer of muscle dysfunction. But I can just about guarantee there will be other keys. It's a little disturbing to me (but also typical of my experience) that it's taken this long for them to pinpoint a muscle that's so often involved in shoulder injuries and arm numbness. I wonder how your teres major is doing, just out of curiosity.

One reason I really don't have any desire to return to gym-type fitness is the overemphasis (IMO) on muscles farther up the kinetic chain, at the expense of foundational alignment that sets the whole thing up for good or ill. I had no idea until I started yoga, how key the hands are to doing a proper plank, chaturanga dandasana or push-up. Not just where they are or which direction they're pointing in, but having equal pressure on each metacarpal head and fingertip. You *can't* protect your shoulders properly until you have hand and wrist strength. Likewise, you can't protect your hips until you have foot strength. But nobody teaches that in any gym setting I've ever been in. Hope yours is different....

Doing push-ups with the aim of knocking out reps would be about the dumbest thing I could do right at the moment. But a good series of mindful sun salutations is actually beneficial to my shoulders. "Hands, feet and head" is one of my yoga teacher's constant emphases (head, because it's a big weight and easy to ignore the neck alignment).

Best of luck with the therapy. I hope you don't rule out acupuncture. It's nothing at all like getting shots, because the needles are so much finer, and doing motor point work in the neck, shoulders and chest shouldn't involve many points that can be sensitive (if any? but that isn't anything I know anything about except by experience). There are exceptions, mostly in the hands, wrists and feet where soft tissue is thin and there are a whole lot of nerve endings, but most of the time all you feel is a tap, no feeling whatsoever of being punctured and no pain. If there's a practitioner in your area certified in sports medicine acupuncture, that would be the way to go - when I just looked the website is down - but there are also lots of practitioners who studied motor point technique with Matt Callison, who developed it, before he started the certification program, so ask around.