Pec Insertion/Shoulder Soreness/Pinching

Pain & Rehab Forum [Moderated]
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I hope this is alright to post and ask, I’m not able to find anything that says you can’t ask about things that might be a bit more minor (looking at some of the stuff on here this certainly feels like it in comparison!).

My problem is that I’ve been getting some pain, sometimes a bit of a pinching sensation, right around the pec major insertion around the front delt. Happening on both sides.

I first experienced this particular pain years ago and it was specifically brought on by close grip bench. It then went away after stopping that particular movement but has returned recently.

Here are a few things that I feel are worth noting:

  • I feel like there is a soreness in the specified location at the bottom of a barbell bench press. For reference, my competition style is a fairly high arch and wide grip, though I’ve been working recently with variations that minimise extension (i.e. flat back) and retraction of the scapulae.
  • If I squeeze my arms across my body, compressing the area, it can be a bit painful. Less sore and more of a “pinching” sensation.
  • I’ve noticed that if I really focus on depressing my scaps and pinning them to my ribcage that the pain is far less noticeable, sometimes even eradicated completely, but I struggle to implement this during actual bench pressing.
  • I feel a bit of soreness if I reach overhead without using the scapular depression mentioned above as well.
  • I’ve been to a couple of physios who’ve each had their own opinions, none of which were helpful. One suspected a pec minor strain and prescibed a bunch of soft tissue work and stretching. The former didn’t do a great deal and the latter, if anything, made the soreness worse. The second physio thought it might be more teres major and subscapularis (if I remember correctly) and similarly recommended the same sort of treatment. Neither physio’s suggestions appeared to do a great deal to help.

The physio visits were a few months back and, having rested bench for a while the pain had gone, but now that I’m prepping for a competition and my bench frequency and volume is on the up I’m getting the soreness start to manifest again.

Sorry its a bit of a read, but I thought the best way to get an accurate idea of what he issue might be would be to provide as much detail as I can!

Thanks in advance for any and all help you can offer.

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Hi there, sorry to hear about this. I think it’s unlikely that a a single “cause” can be identified and easily “fixed”. Rather, you seem to have made a very important observation yourself:

The physio visits were a few months back and, having rested bench for a while the pain had gone, but now that I’m prepping for a competition and my bench frequency and volume is on the up I’m getting the soreness start to manifest again.

This is an extremely common situation that we all experience in the course of training; ultimately, you are going to have to experiment to find the combination of exercise selection, volume, intensity, and frequency that you can tolerate and recover from to manage the progression of symptoms. For competitive lifters we often find training that involves too much specificity (i.e., low variation), and too frequent of exposure to high intensities – so that tends to be where we begin with most people.

The process for this was laid out in this article: Pain in Training: What To Do? , but if you would like individualized guidance / assistance with the process, our rehab clinicians would be happy to help.