Hi, I’m a 22 year old male who has been lifting since high school but I only started taking my health and fitness goals really seriously within the past several months. I’ve dealt with numerous injuries in the past that I handled poorly, and I’ve been trying to determine the best approach to dealing with a new pain that began the past week or so to prevent making the same mistakes.
The main problem I’m experiencing is a shoulder pain on my left side that sets in at the end of the eccentric portion of my bench, usually around the 7th or 8th rep. This started 10 days ago, and initially it was mild enough that I decided to revisit benching 4 days later. The same pain occurred in the same location, at the same portion of my lift with the same weight and this time it lingered for the next few days. Luckily this was right around my deload week, so I’ve been spending the past few days focusing on work at roughly RPE 5-6 with plans on gradually working back up to my original intensity. The structure of my routine in terms of rep ranges now follows the guidelines set out by the pain in training blog post.
I’ve been working on my form primarily by based on the Barbell Medicine and Alan Thrall videos on the topic. I usually started each workout with foam rolling and active unloaded movement, which seems to be non-beneficial based on the Barbell Medicine approach. I discovered this website less than a week ago so I’m sorry if my situation has already been covered, but if my old pre-workout ritual was ineffective is there anything else I should be doing to prevent injuries like this from happening in the future or re-injury right now (besides what has been covered in the blog post)? Assuming my technique was adequate, what could have gone wrong to cause this? At the bottom of my lift I feel an uncomfortable pulling sensation around the area where I felt pain but on both sides of my body, which I used to ignore since I assumed it was just a “stretch” part of the lift. It happens even when I’m training with an empty bar, and the pain now sets in when I try to bench with 135 pounds so I lowered the weight even more.
Additional Information:
I’ve been following a PPL routine since June, and with the incorporated rest days I tend to lift 5 days a week on average
My push days consist of flat bench (4x6-8 at an RPE 9), OHP (4x6-8), landmine shoulder press (4x8-10), close grip bench press (3x10-12), lateral raises (3x10-12), and tricep pushdowns (3x10-12).
My bench progression has been around 5lbs per week, bringing my bench from 185x8 in June to 225x8 when I started experiencing pain
Hey @Quentin_Creatino - thanks for the questions. Ultimately we will need a consultation with you to provide individual advice, but I think you are on the right track with managing loading appropriately based on what is outlined in the pain in training article. If you are finding a particular range of motion in the bench press more symptomatic than the rest (example bottom position), then you can try subbing in pin press and cutting out the most symptomatic range. In subsequent sessions prioritize increasing range of motion back to normal over meeting a particular amount of loading. Additionally, we did a podcast in 2018 on injury risk reduction that you’d likely enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V43m…o5ig&index=168