Pulled Pec, maybe a tear?

Hello, today on the first set of barbell bench I felt a tearing sensation on my outer right pec, causing me to fail the rep and ditch the bar on my stomach. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t see any bruising. I called the upper body session off at that point as I didn’t want to risk further aggravating anything with even the rows and pulldowns I had planned. Is there any way to tell if it’s serious? I programmed in barbell bench after a very long time and this happens, maybe if my chest heals I’ll have to stick to dumbbells and machines. I was doing maybe 12 hard sets a week for chest. Sleep has not been great on Saturday nights, since my friend has wanted to go out to bars lately.

Hi there, I am sorry to hear about your experience in training today. In order to help you with your muscle injury, a remote consultation would be needed with our Pain and Rehab team, as this will allow us for more time to perform comprehensive assessment and provide you with more specific treatment and training advice.

Thank you. I might do the consultation if I continue to experience symptoms. For now I’m going to see if it gets better and make modifications to my program.

If you have not already, I recommend checking out this article about pain in training. Also, if you would like more information regarding muscle injuries, we have this article here. While this is specific to the hip, many of the general principles would apply in your scenario.

If you are noticing that you are having obvious muscle deformities or heard a distinct “pop,” I would recommend getting this checked out by a local provider as soon as possible.

-Hannah