Does anyone else get alot of cracking and popping noises when doing these exercises?

I get alot espically in the shoulders and neck

Yes, I get popping and cracking noises sometimes. I think it's just things loosening up. They don't hurt.

Several months ago I bought some little 1 pound Indian clubs to experiment with and I have to say, I really like them. I've been using them a lot for some of my shoulder and arm exercises. They came with an instructional DVD, "Club swinging with Dr. Ed Thomas". At first, I just practiced doing some of the exercises on the DVD freehand, without the clubs, because my range of motion wasn't good enough, but I'm getting to where I can do a few of them with the clubs now. They really help to loosen up the shoulders and arms. To be honest, I'm really surprised that I'm able to do some of these exercises without flaring myself up.

I also just play around with them a lot and make up my own exercises. Holding the club allows you to relax your arm, and just let the weight and leverage of the club stretch everything out. It feels really good. It's much different than lifting a weight, and since you can move in three dimensions, it gets all your joints working together. I also think the twisting and turning movements are really good for breaking up the muscle fibers and adhesions.

"Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own".-Bruce Lee

My stretching routine is different everyday. I basically just go by the way my body feels. If it feels good, I do more. It there's pain, I do less. Some days I can stretch more aggressively, and other days I just do more movement type stuff. It all depends on the way my body feels.

A perfect example is my lower back right now. I overdid it a couple of weeks ago and it's still sore. It's gradually calming down, but I could hardly straighten up for a week or so. When I get a flare like that, I can't keep up the more aggressive stretching, it will just make it worse. It's the same thing with the thoracic area, if I get a flare, I have to back off until it calms down. Then I have to backtrack on the stretch's a bit, I can't just leave off where I was before the flare. It can be pretty discouraging, but that's just the way it is.

I think the main difference between inflammation and a flare is, the inflammation usually calms down in a day or two, and a flare usually lasts a week or more and I get muscle spasms along with it. Sometimes in the beginning it's hard to tell the difference. Inflammation is OK as long as you don't get muscle spasms. Even after 16 months of this, I still get some inflammation if I stretch a new area.

Coop, I respect your efforts, but reports like these really make me want to avoid these particular stretches and focus on my trigger point therapy workbook first to see what results I can get out of it. The author had similar problems with stretching that you're reporting and didn't get long lasting relief until he focused on trigger points.

The book has 380 reviews on Amazon averaging 4.5 stars and I can vouch that the intro material in it is excellently written. Hopefully in a month or two I'll be able to report whether or not it helped!

I did start with the Egoscue stretches/exercises which I found easy to learn and quite helpful with my pec minor and shoulder pain which is now mostly gone.

380 reviews? How many with TOS that got better?

Hard to say, but you can browse through them if you like:

http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-...dp/1572243759/

The book pages that mention TOS are 80 and 109, although the material I'm looking to get into is more extensive than that. I hold so much tension in my neck and traps, and I want to see if I can release it.

There also appears to be symptom overlap between TOS and trigger points, although given that the "S" in TOS stands for "Syndrome", that might be a non-point.

Wish me luck because I'm going to give it a try.

Here's a website with good detail on Trigger points

http://www.triggerpoints.net/

and some more from our useful sticky thread post #1

Triggerpoints and referred pain and stretching:
http://www.pressurepointer.com/pain_reference_chart.htm
http://www.triggerpointbook.com/index.html
http://triggerpoints.net/_sgg/m1m1_1.htm
http://altmedicine.about.com/library...ressure+points
http://www.drlowe.com./triggerpoint.htm
http://www.bodymindresources.com/car...horaciclab.htm
http://www.erikdalton.com/articleduramater.htm
http://deeptissue.com/articles/articles.html
http://www.edgelow.com/
http://www.rossiter.com/aboutus/tellmemorerossiter.asp
http://www.egoscue.com/htdocs/index.asp

the links didn't carry over - here's the post w/active links
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/post388-1.html

I keep searching the Internet looking for people who have beaten TOS, fibromyalgia, chronic pain. I haven't found that much. I know Jomar has done it, but she didn't have surgery. That lady that cured her fibromyalgia has done it, but she didn't have TOS surgery either. I haven't heard of anyone who has had a failed TOS surgery and then got better years later with exercise. I could be wrong, I'm just saying I haven't heard a story like that. Has anyone else?

So I guess that doesn't make my odds very good, but that's OK. It just gives me more motivation.

I think there was a teacher or 2 & a singer?? that had surgery and seemed to be fine, more or less and they went back to work, but haven't heard anymore from them.
No updates from them and I can't recall the usernames...it was years ago.

I suppose many might feel bad posting that they are better when others are still in pain and having problems..