Pain in left acromion process when benching

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
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I am a 31 years old male who has trained for 5 years. I have had no real injuries in that time. Things sometimes hurt but i generally ignore it or make a slight modification and that has worked pretty well for me in general up until 6 months ago. I will begin with what the status is now and work backwards.

I recently tried to reintroduce bench pressing after cutting it out for 6 months. I have been using between 30% and 50% of my max (115KG (although that was done maybe 2 years ago)). When bench pressing I have an intense pain in my left acromion process. This pain only intensifies after i finish the set. For the 24 hours after bench pressing my left shoulder hurts when i move my arm overhead. The acromion process is also very tender to touch. It is considerably bigger than the one on my rightside and it looks like a bursitis but I have no medical background so don’t really know. This is an improvement over what the situation was 6 months ago when I decided to cut out the bench press totally. I was stupid and did a very high volume of training. Pain built up over the course of the mesocycle but i ignored it because my experience had been, up to that point, that things subside, however it didn’t and culminated in intense pain in my pectoralis minor whenever i benched. It was so bad that I don’t think I noticed how pissed off my whole shoulder girdle was and in particular this acromion process on the leftside. I stopped bench pressing and focused more on overhead press which was pretty pain free. With hindsight I was aware that I was having a hard time pushing straight up vertically on the ohp. My left side had a tendency to be wonky, which had never been an issue before. I eventually (after a few months) managed to correct this wonkiness by concentrating very hard on it. At this point I was pleased that my pectoralis minor didn’t hurt anymore. So then I tried to bench again but had pain right away in the pec minor with basically the empty bar. So I just thought I needed to take a bit longer break from the bench press. That was a few months ago and now recently I tried to reintroduce it. I modified my technique a little bit to have a more flat back setup so my chest doesn’t start in such a stretched position, which has stopped the pec minor pain. The thing that has helped the most is just thinking about pulling my scapulae together rather than together and down. This gives me the sensation of having more space for things to move around in both shoulders. As i said above rather than lots of generalised pain, I just have one very intenese pain in the left acromion process.

This pain feels very permanent. I feel very fustrated and stupid. I regret ignoring the signs. I now question pain much more closely than I used to. I am not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I am not sure exactly why I made this post. Maybe I am hoping for some reassurance that the situation might not be permanent even though it feels very permanent. I am also not sure what to do training wise. Should i just give up on bench press and just do overhead press?

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Hi Charlie, sorry to hear about your current situation and I apologize for the delay in response, but hopefully we can help you out. I would start by saying this is far from a permanent situation, but I understand where you’re coming from with that feeling. The fact that you still have pain and difficulty with benching, despite the long rest, may be exactly due to taking that much time off from benching. In a scenario like this, you may just need more of a structured plan that can start you off in a place where horizontal pressing is tolerable and progress from there, using short term goals to build on long term goals. This is not to try to find blame in what you have done, more so taking into account your history and current situation and looking for modifiable factors we can focus on. More times than not, natural history will be on your side, but you may just need more structure and guidance at this point. A consult with our team may be a good option, or we may be able to find you a good clinician depending on where you live.

For now, I wouldn’t use 115kg as your working max, as that is not representative of what you can handle right now and percentages don’t take into account your current effort and symptoms. Have you tried other forms of benching, i.e. dumbbell, incline, and if so, what’s your tolerance for those variations?

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Hi Mike, thanks for the reply! I have some new information. I think the pain in the acromion process on the left side was in part due to a separated shoulder on that side. My understanding is also that ligaments take a long time to heal, therefore it could be the case that the ligament partially healed but never fully and then i re-aggravated it everytime I tried to do different pressing. I don’t think all of the symptoms can be explained by the separated shoulder since looking at photos of myself I am guessing it happened some time in June and i definitely had pain prior to that in that shoulder. Either way, I am going to the doctor in a week (takkes forever to get an appointment) and I will see what he says. As for lifting, I am going to give the shoulder 6 weeks, since that seems to be how long it takes for ligaments to heal according to doctor google! After I have been to the doctor, I will post on here to say what his opinion is.