Eric Cressey Side-Lying External Rotation video

I love these little gems of coaching information from Eric Cressey.

Eric Cressey is the guy you'd go to for shoulder or elbow trouble. He has, by a combination of amazing knowledge, practical experience, and personal experience, made himself into a shoulder-and-elbow (and most of everything else) expert.

He also puts out these short, to-the-point videos dealing with common exercise errors.

This one deals with a common and effective rotater cuff exercise, the side lying external rotation (sometimes called the side lying L-fly).

Troubleshooting the Side-Lying External Rotation

What I like about it is the tweaks to make it more effective, and easy ways to detect error. Most rotator cuff exercises are easy to "cheat" by accident. If you have an RC issue, it's probably because you have something wrong and found a way to compensate. You will likely keep unconsciously compensating to complete any exercises you're doing to fix that compensation. With the tweaks in the video above, you'll feel the actual intended target muscle working better. For a rehab exercise, that's critical - the goal is to get the "team" of muscles working together properly, not just do a movement.

That's a great little video, and Eric Cressey's blog is always full of useful information. It's mostly aimed from one coach to another, but it's applicable to people of all levels of experience.