Hello Doctors,
I just came from a couple of months lay off due to not being able to afford going to the gym, but now I had a home gym for ~ three weeks.
When benching with light weights today (wanted to work up to a heavy 5RM for a couple of sets), I started noticing some pain on my left palm, and didn’t decide to bench any heavier still kept it light, but still felt some pain. I’m not sure if it could be a nerve damage. The pain is across the middle of my palm.
Thanks,
Bolder
Hey,
Have you read this from Dr Baraki?
Pain in training: What do?
One cause of your pain that I can think of would be holding the bar too far from the wrist itself. The weight should always be stacked above the forearm, otherwise you will run into wrist/hand pain and inadequate force transfer to the bar.
I had a very similar experience when I started training, and again when I came back to it after a few months off. IDK know if it has anything to do with nerve damage, but that doesn’t really matter anyway. Honestly, I just trained through it both times and it resolved in ~3 weeks both times. I don’t think that’s the best strategy though, the name of the game is load management. You and me both restarted training and immediately wanted to hit 5RMs on BP, this is silly, in general you should be slowly scaling up the training stress (and 5RMs probably don’t have a ton of utility anyways, IMO). The Pain in Training What Do article will get you where you need to be. I just wanted to add that in my experience this is an issue that can be resolved quickly and easily.
P.S. Maybe run the Beginner Prescription (free version), with modifications while you’re increasing your tolerance to pressing.