Proximal short head bicep tendinopathy issue

Hello all,

In June 2019 I started to develop some discomfort near my armpit, right under the anterior deltoid on the medial side when bench pressing. The pain became persistent so I stopped bench pressing for a while, but continued training otherwise. That seemed to help reduce the occurrence of the pain but the pain started to pop up doing other exercises, like pull-ups or any vertical pulling variation, or any sort of press variation. Eventually, virtually all upper body exercises caused pain in the area during the workout (even light lateral raises, shrugs, and grip exercises, for example).

As of now, any exercise that involves shoulder ab/adduction, flexion, extension seems to bother it quite a bit. I’ve even tried doing very light dumbbell presses (10 lb dumbbell) for some reps with slow, controlled tempo on the floor, keeping my humerus parallel with my torso and it still causes discomfort. The proximal area of the short head gets pretty tight during the exercise and then hurts later on and then the next morning. The only exercise that has seemed to feel ok and possibly help has been very light dumbbell bicep curls, but I’m not completely confident its helping.

The pain in general is pretty consistent throughout the day, fortunately it doesn’t bother me at night when I’m sleeping. I can’t really even raise my arm parallel to the ground without feeling tightness and a little bit of pain most of the time. At this point, I’ve decided to stop training, I haven’t done a workout in almost a couple weeks and it sucks because I understand full rest is not at all ideal for healing an injury, but I just can’t seem to find an exercise that I can do that doesn’t cause pain either during my workout or after. And of course, I’ve felt no improvement in pain over these 11 days of full rest.

I would continue to train my lower body since that may possibly help things due to increase in systemic blood flow, but I’m also dealing with a nagging knee injury. I also have noticed when my knee is really bothering me, my bicep bothers me less during that time and vice versa. Is there any truth or evidence that pain signals “compete” with one another, one dominating the signal of the other?

I haven’t seen a doctor regarding this issue so tendinopathy in the short head is my own self- diagnosis (the pain and tightness is pretty well concentrated on the short head tendon so I’m pretty confident in this self-diagnosis). I’ve chosen not to go to a doctor up to this point because I’ve had pretty bad experiences going to doctors regarding injuries/issues in the past, although I wish I could at least have an MRI done. Tendinopathy in the short head also seems to be a less common issue than in other areas of the bicep because I haven’t had much luck finding any good articles for dealing with tendinopathy in the proximal short head specifically.

Either way, my general understanding when dealing with serious injuries is to not train through pain (even though pain is not a perfect signal). If you’re feeling at least a “moderate” degree of pain (which is pretty subjective) during or after an exercise with a serious injury, its likely making it worse or maintaining it (and I think this is the case for me). The goal is to try and find an exercise for the area that little or no discomfort. However, it doesn’t seem like I can find a tolerable entry point with any exercise and slowly work up without causing a moderate amount of persistent pain. Does anyone have some suggestions for me? I’d really appreciate it. Thanks,

Cory

Hey, check these out from Dr Baraki:

Pain in training: What do?

4 Steps For Managing Pain In The Gym