"It Feels Better" Isn't the Whole Story: How ShowMotion Helps Us See What's Really Happening in Your Shoulder
Ask most people how their shoulder is doing three weeks into rehab, and you'll get some version of "better, I think." Ask most physical therapists if someone’s shoulder is moving normally during their recovery, and you’ll get some version of “it’s shrugging, I think.” These are not bad answers. Pain and confidence are real, meaningful signals. A shoulder that doesn’t quite move normal is something every clinician has seen. But there is also a level of subjectivity here, a level of difficulty defining something in a measurable way that we can look back on weeks or months later and compare to. Someone can feel less pain while still moving through a compensated pattern that's setting them up for the same problem down the road. Someone can be moving their shoulder completely normally but have a muscle or tendon that’s irritated. Someone else can feel discouraged by a flare-up while their actual movement quality has quietly improved. These issues can be hard to pick apart, and take a lot of clinical expertise to do so properly.
This is the gap that ShowMotion®, a technology developed by Alyve Medical, is built to close. Alyve Medical is a company that I consult with to help develop and improve their devices, and to help get technologies that truly help patients in to the hands of the proper people. Here is my disclosure- this company pays me to help improve their devices. I will only ever use them with patients that, in my experience, will actually benefit. And I will only ever do so with a business model that is ethical and affordable for the value it provides.
What ShowMotion Actually Is
ShowMotion uses a set of non-invasive motion tracking sensors placed on your body. You perform a series of guided movements targeting the area of concern (currently only the shoulder) and the sensors capture this movement data in a way that’s more precise and measurable than my eye can see alone. This information gathering process takes about 10 minutes most of the time. This information is displayed on a computer, where I will explain the results. This makes it possible to spot altered motion patterns and compensatory movements that aren't always obvious to the eye alone. It also makes it possible to get a snapshot in time of how your shoulder is moving. Pre-season, pre-climbing trip, pre-training program, pre-injury… if we know how you moved beforehand, we can more accurately help restore that pattern once you’ve lost it.
Why "Objective" Actually Matters Here
Shoulder problems are notoriously hard to pin down with observation alone. There are many physical tests that a PT can perform to tease out what structure may be injured. Imaging can define an anatomical injury, but it can’t say anything about movement quality. Two patients with the same diagnosis, i.e. a rotator cuff strain, can present completely differently, and the same patient can look "fine" on a good day and move very differently on a bad one. Compensation patterns, in particular, are sneaky: the body is very good at finding a workaround that reduces pain in the moment while quietly overloading something else.
Motion capture technology takes some of the guesswork out of that. Instead of relying purely on visual assessment or how a movement feels to the patient, ShowMotion generates an actual three-dimensional picture of how the joint is moving through space.
From One-Time Snapshot to Progress Tracking
The real value shows up over time. Because the assessment is quick and repeatable, it's practical to run it at intake and then again at intervals throughout a plan of care. It’s practical to have a short session to establish your movement baseline, and then return if there is ever an injury to compare how things are moving differently. This doesn’t have to be done just once for a diagnosis, but as an ongoing way to check whether the treatment plan is actually working. This can be integrated with other rehabilitation exercises or technologies to define if they are actually helping the way we hope they are.
That turns "I think you're moving better" into a side-by-side comparison: here's your scapular motion at week one, here's the same movement at week six, here's what changed. For a client, that kind of visual proof can be genuinely motivating, especially in the frustrating middle stretch of recovery when progress feels slow day-to-day but is very real over weeks.
For the clinician, it's a tool for adjusting course. If a movement pattern isn't improving the way it should be despite a patient's reported pain going down, that's useful information. It might mean the pain relief is coming from compensation rather than true improvement, and the plan needs to shift.
Where It Fits in a Shoulder Care Plan
ShowMotion isn't a replacement for a thorough clinical exam or a conversation about how someone's actually feeling day to day. It's a complement to both. It's most useful for:
Establishing a real baseline at the start of care or when someone is healthy and trying to prevent injuries down the road, rather than relying on a single subjective description of "it hurts when I..."
Catching compensation patterns early, before they become ingrained habits that create secondary problems elsewhere in the kinetic chain
Objectively validating progress , or flagging when a plan isn't producing the movement changes it should be, even if pain is trending down
Building patient buy-in, since seeing your own movement data is often more convincing than being told your form has improved
For anyone dealing with a persistent shoulder issue, especially one that's been slow to resolve or hard to pin down, this kind of objective movement tracking adds a layer of clarity that pain scales and range-of-motion measurements alone can't fully provide.
Curious whether ShowMotion assessment makes sense for your shoulder issue? Reach out and we can talk through whether it's a good fit for your situation.