Hello again,
hopefully this post ends up being a useful addition to these forums, as I haven’t seen a case of what I am experiencing in most forums I have searched including this one.
History:
I am a 6’1" 220pd 28 y/o male who has been lifting for 13 years, strength training for ~1 year.
My bench is ~365, squat ~ 450, deadlift ~500
pre-existing health conditions/ diseases/ injuries: head injury Dec.2016 (hit back of head snowboarding, suffered whiplash, no doctor visit at the time), high cholesterol
Issue:
I get headaches and neck discomfort/ stiffness every day. The headache pain is very dull, almost pressure-like, and is usually felt in different spots around my head. I sometimes get it in either temple, sometimes in the maxillary sinus areas, sometimes at the base of my skull, sometimes near the crown of my head. I suspect that the headaches are cervicogenic as they are so variable, and I virtually never had headaches until after my whiplash injury in late 2016, which also left me with sore mastoid processes on either side which still persists. My SCMs are also often sore and I suspect weak. As for my deep flexors/ other cervical muscles, I suspect they are involved but it’s harder to tell. I have done some reading on SCM dysfunction and this seems somewhat similar to my case. The problem is, my symptoms become exacerbated when I lift anything close to maximal loads during training, bringing my pain that might be dull or just in one spot to a full-blown headache. During training as the tightness increases through my working sets, I sometimes might get slightly blurred vision, or feel slightly dizzy. These sensations subside after rest. Multiple times I have backed off weight to a point where it doesn’t seem to stress my neck during training for a period of 2-3 weeks, this reduces the symptom flares during training, but the residual symptoms still persist day to day until I get frustrated that I’m not getting better and am getting weaker because I’m backing off training, at which point I go back to challenging weights. I get no numbness or tingling anywhere, and the pain never leaves neck/ head.
Things I have done to try to resolve this:
-Visited PCP complaining of headaches, specifically asked if I should be worried about anything vascular, doc said he wasn’t concerned as headaches were very non-specific. Wrote me a script for PT.
-Did 3 months of PT 2x/ wk. Mostly consisted of chin tucks, mid/ low trap exercises, serratus presses, and proprioception training…most of which I didn’t think would help but tried anyway
-as stated before backed off weights and slowly worked back up multiple times (if working weight was 385 5X5, I dropped to 315).
-Tried benching with head off the bench to make sure I wasnt driving into the bench with head…alternatively tried making sure I kept head on bench so I wasn’t over-activating neck flexors
-completely stopped deadlifting for a few weeks since DL and bench seem particularly nefarious for setting of headaches.
Anyway I’m super frustrated over this since your neck contracts during pretty much any major movement so I feel like I can’t train. I see tons of people with/ solutions for the common pains like elbow, knee, back, whatever, but for some reason I’m the only lifter that I can find that has this problem specifically. I’m tempted to ignore it, since what else am I gonna do, not train?
As always you guys are awesome and thanks for your time.