What Connor Bedard's Back-to-Back Shoulder Injuries Tell Us About Athletic Durability
Connor Bedard injured his right shoulder in December. Now his left. This isn't bad luck — it's a textbook compensation pattern that affects athletes at every level. Here's what's actually happening.
By Dr. Matt Heisig, DC | Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic | Long Beach, CA
Update — July 9, 2026:
Since this post was published, the Blackhawks announced that Connor Bedard has undergone shoulder surgery on his left shoulder and will be sidelined for approximately four months. The injury occurred during a practice session in Vancouver — the same left shoulder incident that prompted this analysis. The surgical intervention confirms what the bilateral compensation pattern suggested: this wasn’t a minor soft tissue sprain. It was a structural failure on the compensating side. Everything written below was based on publicly available injury reporting before the surgery was announced — and unfortunately, the outcome validates the concern.
If you've been following hockey this offseason, you've probably seen the news: Blackhawks star Connor Bedard suffered an apparent left shoulder injury during a training session in Vancouver on July 3rd — just seven months after injuring his right shoulder in St. Louis last December.
Two different shoulders. Less than a year apart.
To most people, that reads as bad luck. To me, it reads as a textbook pattern.
This Isn't a Coincidence — It's Compensation
When Bedard injured his right shoulder in December, he missed 13 games over roughly four weeks. As is common in the NHL, and professional sports in general, Bedard more than likely returned to play once he was 'feeling good enough' but maybe not fully healed up. That's not a criticism of the decision — it's the reality of professional sports. But biomechanically, returning to high-intensity play with a compensation pattern already established is exactly how the opposite side gets set up for failure.
Here's what happens biomechanically when you do that: your nervous system is smart. It reroutes. It offloads the compromised side and asks the opposite side to compensate. You don't feel it happening — you just feel like you're getting through it. But the left side is now doing work it wasn't designed to do alone, in positions it wasn't prepared for, at the speed and intensity of professional hockey.
Eventually, that side breaks too.
This is called bilateral compensation — and it's one of the most common patterns I see in athletes at every level, from NHL stars to Long Beach weekend warriors.
The Mistake Most Athletes Make After an Injury
The standard return-to-play protocol goes something like this: rest, rehab the injured structure, wait until it's pain-free, return to sport.
That protocol has a critical flaw: it treats the injured shoulder in isolation. It asks "is the right shoulder okay?" but never asks "what happened to the left side while the right was down?"
By the time you're cleared to play again, the compensatory patterns are already baked in. Your movement is asymmetrical. Your ribcage has shifted. Your scapula on the opposite side has lost its stable base. You feel fine — until you don't.
This is exactly why Bedard's situation isn't surprising to anyone who understands how the body actually adapts to injury.
What PRI Has to Do With This
The Postural Restoration Institute framework gives us a way to understand why bilateral shoulder injuries are so common — and it starts with the ribcage, not the shoulder.
As I covered in more detail in my first post on [why shoulder injuries keep coming back](link to post 1 here), the human body is inherently asymmetrical. In short, your diaphragm functions differently on each side, your liver sits right, your heart sits left, and these differences create predictable patterns of ribcage rotation and shoulder blade positioning that your nervous system manages automatically — until it can't.
What's interesting is that these asymmetries are often visible even before an injury occurs. Take a look at Bedard at the 2023 NHL Draft Combine — three years before his first professional shoulder injury:
Look carefully at Bedard's posture here. His left shoulder sits visibly higher than his right — the left ribcage is more than likely elevated and pulling it up. His right shoulder meanwhile sits lower and appears internally rotated, with his right arm falling slightly into his thorax. His weight is shifted to the right through his hips, and his right foot is externally rotated — a compensation pattern that follows the pelvis.
In PRI terms, this is a recognizable presentation. The left side is elevated and overworked, the right side is depressed and internally rotated. For a right-handed hockey player whose elite wrist shot requires explosive internal rotation of the right shoulder at high velocity — this is a structural setup for exactly the kind of right shoulder injury he experienced in December. The left shoulder injury that followed in July is the compensation completing itself.
Note: This is an observational analysis based on a single photograph and publicly available injury reporting. I have not examined Connor Bedard and this does not constitute a diagnosis.
Back to the biomechanics. Under high load — professional hockey, beach volleyball, a hard training block — those patterns get amplified. When you add an acute injury on one side, the nervous system doubles down on the compensation. The opposite shoulder blade loses its stable platform. The mechanics of overhead movement, reaching, and rotation become subtly altered on both sides.
By the time you feel the second injury, the foundation has been compromised for weeks or months.
For a closer look at Bedard in action — and that elite wrist shot release that puts enormous rotational demand on both shoulders — The Rink Live article has game photos worth seeing. Connor Bedard’s OT goal lifts Blackhawks past Jets
Why This Matters for Long Beach Athletes
You don't have to be Connor Bedard for this pattern to affect you.
If you play beach volleyball, football, rock climb, or just hit the gym and tweaked your right shoulder earlier this season — and now your left side feels tight or your mechanics feel off — this is worth paying attention to. If you're an athlete who played through a right shoulder sprain and your left feels "different" but not painful — that's your nervous system telling you something.
The window between "compensating" and "injured on the other side" is exactly where structural chiropractic work has the most impact. Not when you're already hurt — when you're managing something and your body is quietly rerouting.
Is Your Body Already Compensating?
If you're wondering whether this pattern applies to you, I put together a quick self-check in my first post that's worth running through right now. Take 60 seconds and check here. The Real Reason You Keep Re-Injuring Your Shoulders
If you answered yes to any of those — your body is already compensating. The question is whether you address it now or wait for the second injury to make the decision for you.
The Bottom Line
Connor Bedard's back-to-back shoulder injuries aren't a story about bad luck or fragility. They're a story about what happens when return-to-play protocols treat the injured structure without addressing the system-wide compensation that injury creates.
Elite athletes have an entire medical staff. Most of us don't. Which means the window for catching these patterns before they become the second injury is entirely dependent on whether you're paying attention — and whether someone is helping you look in the right places.
If you're dealing with a shoulder issue — or recovering from one and wondering why the other side doesn't feel right — book your Initial Evaluation at Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic in Long Beach. No referral needed.
About the Author: Dr. Matt Heisig is a Doctor of Chiropractic and founder of Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic in Long Beach, CA. A graduate of Southern California University of Health Sciences with a sports medicine emphasis, Dr. Matt utilizes PRI methodology, active movement rehab, and performance-focused care for athletes at all levels. He sees patients at Long Beach Rising on weekends.
Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic is located inside Long Beach Rising at 205 E Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90813. Dr. Matt Heisig, DC sees patients on weekends and accepts HSA/FSA.
The Real Reason You Keep Re-Injuring the Same Shoulder (And Why Rest Isn't Fixing It)
If your shoulder keeps flaring up every few weeks, rest isn't the answer. Here's what's actually driving the breakdown — and how to fix it for good.
By Dr. Matt Heisig, DC | Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic | Long Beach, CA
If you've tweaked the same shoulder two or three times in the past year, you're probably doing what most athletes do — resting it, icing it, maybe doing some light band work you found on YouTube or Instagram, and waiting for it to calm down.
And it does calm down. For a while.
Then you're back in the sand, back on the ice, back in the gym — and somewhere around week three, it flares up again. Same spot. Same feeling. Different day.
This isn't bad luck. It's a pattern. And the reason it keeps happening isn't because your shoulder is weak or fragile. It's because nobody has looked at why it keeps breaking down in the first place.
The Problem With "Just Rest It"
Rest is not a treatment. Rest is a pause.
When you rest a shoulder injury, you reduce inflammation and give irritated tissue time to calm down. That feels like progress. But the underlying movement dysfunction — the reason the shoulder got loaded wrong in the first place — is still sitting there, completely untouched.
The moment you return to full activity, the same faulty pattern plays out. The same tissues get overloaded. The same spot flares up.
You haven't fixed anything. You've just waited long enough for the pain to become tolerable.
The Real Cause of Recurring Shoulder Injuries
Here's what most people don't know about recurring shoulder injuries: the problem usually isn't in the shoulder.
The shoulder is where you feel it. But the root cause is almost always upstream — in your ribcage position, your breathing mechanics, and the asymmetrical movement patterns your nervous system has learned to rely on.
This is where Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) methodology comes in. The human body is inherently asymmetrical — your heart sits left, your liver sits right, your diaphragm functions differently on each side. Over time, especially in athletes who train hard and recover passively, these asymmetries compound. The ribcage rotates and shifts. The shoulder blade loses its stable base. The mechanics of overhead movement, reaching, and rotation get subtly altered.
Now every time you spike a volleyball, throw a football, or rip a wristshot on the ice, your shoulder is working from a compromised position. It doesn't hurt at first. But the cumulative load eventually exceeds what that tissue can handle — and you're back to square one.
The most commonly involved structures in this pattern are the posterior rotator cuff (infraspinatus and teres minor), the long head of the biceps tendon, and the AC joint — all of which get loaded asymmetrically when the scapula loses its stable base on a rotated ribcage. The shoulder isn't failing on its own. It's compensating for a foundation problem below it.
Why This Is Especially Common in Long Beach Athletes
Let’s be real, it’s summer time and we’re all outside enjoying the sun and what our city has to offer. If you play beach volleyball, swim in the ocean, paddleboard, do outrigger, or play any overhead sport outdoors — your shoulder is doing a lot of work in one plane of motion, repeatedly, often without the structural foundation to support it.
Add in the fact that most athletes in Long Beach are training hard during the week and competing hard on the weekends, with minimal recovery work that actually addresses movement quality, and you have a recipe for the exact cycle most of my patients come in stuck in.
Quick Self-Check: Is This Your Shoulder?
Stand in front of a mirror with arms relaxed. Is one shoulder visibly higher or more forward than the other?
Reach both arms overhead. Does one feel restricted or does your back arch excessively to compensate?
Take a deep breath in. Does your chest rise more than your ribcage expands sideways? If you answered yes to any of these, your shoulder issue likely has a postural root cause — not just a tissue problem.
How Sports Chiropractic Fixes Shoulder Injuries for Good
The sessions I run at Athlete Lab are specifically designed around this problem.
Every visit starts on the table — deep soft tissue work to clear the restrictions that have built up around the shoulder, scapula, and ribcage. We address the tissue directly, not just the symptom.
Then we get off the table. Because what happens on the table means nothing if it doesn't change how you move. We use PRI-based repositioning work to reset your ribcage mechanics, restore symmetrical shoulder blade position, and give your nervous system a new reference point to work from. Then once we are more posturally sound, our exercises to strengthen around the shoulder are going to have a much more lasting effect.
The result isn't just a shoulder that feels better in the short term. It's a shoulder that loads correctly — so the same pattern doesn't keep repeating itself every six weeks.
The Bottom Line
If your shoulder keeps coming back, the answer isn't more rest and more ice. The answer is finding out what's actually driving the breakdown — and fixing that.
You don't have to keep managing this. You can actually resolve it.
Ready to figure out what's actually going on with your shoulder? Book your Initial Evaluation at Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic in Long Beach. No referral needed — just show up ready to move.
About the Author: Dr. Matt Heisig is a Doctor of Chiropractic and founder of Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic in Long Beach, CA. A graduate of Southern California University of Health Sciences with a sports medicine emphasis, Dr. Matt utilizes PRI methodology, active movement rehab, and performance-focused care for athletes at all levels. He sees patients at Long Beach Rising on weekends.
Athlete Lab Performance Chiropractic is located inside Long Beach Rising at 205 E Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90813. Dr. Matt Heisig, DC sees patients on weekends and accepts HSA/FSA.