A shoulder stinger is a nerve injury that sends a sudden, sharp burst of burning or electric-shock pain from your neck down through your arm to your fingertips. It happens when the bundle of nerves near your neck and shoulder, called the brachial plexus, gets stretched or compressed by a forceful impact. The sensation typically lasts seconds to minutes, though some cases linger much longer. Stingers are also called “burners,” and they’re one of the most common nerve injuries in contact sports.
How a Stinger Happens
The brachial plexus is a network of nerves that runs from your spinal cord in the neck, through a gap between your collarbone and first rib, and into your arm. These nerves control movement and sensation in your shoulder, arm, and hand. A stinger occurs when these nerves, or the nerve roots where they exit the spine, get traumatically stretched or pinched.
There are three main ways this happens. The most common in younger athletes is a traction injury: your shoulder gets driven downward while your head snaps to the opposite side, stretching the nerves like a rubber band pulled too far. The second mechanism is compression, where the head and neck get forced backward and to one side, narrowing the bony openings in the spine where nerves exit and pinching them. The third involves a direct blow to a spot on the side of the neck called Erb’s point, which is the most exposed, superficial location of the brachial plexus. A hit here can compress the nerve bundle between your shoulder pad (or the ground) and your shoulder blade.
The nerves most commonly affected are the C5 and C6 nerve roots in the upper trunk of the plexus. These nerves control your ability to bend your elbow, lift your arm out to the side, and rotate your shoulder outward. That’s why weakness in those specific movements is a hallmark of the injury.
What It Feels Like
The defining feature of a stinger is its sudden, intense quality. People describe it as a burning, electrical, or knife-like pain that shoots from the neck into the shoulder and down the arm, sometimes all the way to the fingertips. Immediately after the injury, the affected arm may feel numb, weak, or warm. You might have trouble lifting your arm or gripping objects for a period afterward.
One important characteristic: stingers affect only one arm. If you feel burning, numbness, or weakness in both arms after an impact, that’s a different and more serious injury pattern that needs immediate medical attention.
Who Gets Stingers
Stingers are overwhelmingly associated with collision sports. Roughly 50% to 65% of college football players report experiencing at least one stinger during their careers, and 30% to 40% of rugby players report the same. The true numbers are likely higher, since many athletes don’t mention the injury to training staff, especially when symptoms resolve quickly.
Though football and rugby account for the majority of cases, stingers can happen in any activity involving forceful contact to the head, neck, or shoulder: wrestling, hockey, martial arts, and even cycling or skiing crashes. They can also occur in children after relatively minor trauma.
Recovery and When Symptoms Linger
Most stingers resolve on their own within seconds to minutes. The burning fades, strength returns, and the arm feels normal again. These short-lived episodes represent the mildest form of nerve injury, where the nerve is temporarily stunned but not structurally damaged.
In more significant cases, weakness and numbness can persist for days, weeks, or occasionally months. The longer symptoms last, the more likely the nerve sustained actual structural damage rather than just a temporary disruption. Recurrent stingers, where someone experiences the same injury repeatedly over a season, also raise concern about underlying issues like narrowing of the spinal canal or disc problems in the neck.
If symptoms last more than a few minutes, or if stingers keep happening, imaging becomes important. An MRI of the cervical spine can reveal disc herniations, bone spurs, or spinal canal narrowing that may be contributing to repeated nerve compression. Nerve conduction testing (which measures how well the affected nerves are transmitting signals) can be performed as early as seven days after the injury to assess the extent of damage.
Returning to Activity Safely
For athletes, the standard for returning to play after a stinger is straightforward but strict. You need to be completely free of pain, have full range of motion in your neck, and demonstrate full strength in your arm with no lingering neurological symptoms. If any of those criteria aren’t met, playing through it risks turning a minor nerve stretch into a more significant injury.
Rehabilitation for a stinger that involves the C5 and C6 nerve roots focuses on restoring elbow flexion, shoulder abduction (lifting the arm to the side), and external rotation of the shoulder. Strengthening the neck muscles is also a priority, since a stronger neck better resists the forces that cause traction injuries in the first place. Athletes with recurrent stingers sometimes use specialized neck rolls or collar attachments on their helmets to limit extreme neck motion during impacts.
Stingers vs. More Serious Neck Injuries
A stinger can feel alarming, but it’s important to distinguish it from a cervical spine injury. Stingers produce one-sided symptoms, no neck instability, and no midline neck pain when pressing on the spine. A cervical spine injury can cause bilateral symptoms (both arms, or arms and legs), difficulty walking, or tenderness directly over the vertebrae. Any of these signs require immobilization and emergency evaluation.
The distinction matters because both injuries can happen during the same type of collision. If there’s any doubt about whether the injury is a simple stinger or something involving the spinal cord, the safest approach is to treat it as the more serious possibility until proven otherwise.