I had an injury to my costal cartilage ~10 months ago. I took a shoulder directly into my sternum at full speed while playing hockey. It took a good 6-8 weeks before the pain was not there all the time. However, when I do certain activities that involve twisting, like swinging a golf club, the pain comes back. It’s been there ever since the injury, but only hurts during the twisting movement. Then it goes away immediately. I recently played in a three day golf tournament. Ever since then, the pain has been there almost constantly now. I can even feel it at the bottom of my bench press. It’s not severe, but is annoying. I would’ve thought that it would be completely normal by now. Apparently not.
Is there anything that can be done to help it heal fully? Obviously rest didn’t really do it.
Sorry to hear this is still giving you problems. Costal cartilage injuries typically suck but your recovery follows the normal process we see. Like with many other injuries, it comes into gradual dosing return to activities. Playing a three day golf tournament likely greatly exceeded the amount of twisting you had done in the recent past so it is not too surprising there was an exacerbation. I would suggest after this episode calms down, starting at the range to begin reintroducing some twisting before going out and attempting 54 holes in three days. Once you have hit a bucket or two at the range, start with a round and see how that goes, then start towards multiple rounds. It is analogous to how we would approach returning to heavy squatting, a three day tournament may have been maxing on day 1 though.
Thanks Derek! When you say dosing, do you mean the pain should go away immediately after the movement or the pain should not be present at all? I’ve done some of what you said, and the pain is still always there. But only during the swing. Once the swing is over, it is gone. Is that an OK level of movement? Or do I need to scale it back even more than that?
This gets into some of the same terminology for dosing that we would talk about if reintroducing a squat. If there has been an acute exacerbation it may not be time to break out the driver, even at the range yet, but rather start with your short game. It sounds like some of this is contingent about both the volume of strokes and the intensity of the stroke within. If you can go out with a sand wedge and start hitting with minimal pain, move up to a pitching wedge…so on and so forth. If this has been going on for 10 months, likely your overall “training” for golf has went down dramatically as well. Times like this can end up being advantageous for your game overall as it makes you work on the components of golf that typically are not emphasized. Even getting a wedge if you have a decent size hard and starting to work on some 20-40 yard chips will help start building up some tolerance and likely improve your game.