Rotator cuff injury. What to do?

22 year old 5’6 148lber.

I was benching and doing a 200lb single which should’ve been an RPE 7 or so, but I heard a ton of snaps and pops in my right shoulder on the way down accompanied by a lot of pain. I immediately couldn’t move my shoulder too well. This happened after running my own program which was a lower volume higher intensity approach (2x a week) and then, stupidly, stitching that together with the much higher volume PL2 peaking block which also has decent intensity given that it’s the peaking phase. I wasn’t used to that frequency of benching anymore since I haven’t ran that program in a while, and I think I just didn’t have the adaptation to jump straight into week 10 with my style of programming that I was running beforehand.

5 weeks later and it was feeling a bit better, but yesterday I inflamed it again. 135 hurts on the way down and it feels like one part of my shoulder is completely getting snagged on another part of my shoulder. It’s really uncomfortable and it locks up a lot even outside of benching. I was hoping to do at least 135 for sets of 8-10, but 5 is as far as I could go without a sudden onset of pain.

i haven’t gotten screened or anything, but I’m wondering if I should. Just looking at the shoulder anatomy, it is pointing towards the rotator cuff area (supraspinatus I think is what the specific tendon is called). I’m imagining it’s torn which would be the worst injury I’ve had so far.

I am completely lost on what to do. On the plus side, my squats are going well at least

Hi there,

Sorry to hear about this. You did not mention specifics of what you did during that 5 week period, but I would recommend an approach similar to that outlined in these resources:

Thank you for the reply.

during the 5 weeks I essentially just did 135 for 3-4x8-10. The first set would typically be an RPE 6 and it would end up being about an RPE 9 by the end (when doing 4-5x10.) upon reviewing the article, I should reduce proximity to failure and do slightly less sets, and especially be careful with the shoulder work which I for some reason pushed to failure these last two times.

Thanks for the help!

Correct. I would pull back from 135 lbs as far as necessary, incorporate tempo (3-1-3 or 3-1-0 to start), and cap the final set RPE at 6-7 if feeling really sensitive, or 7-8 if tolerating things well (which you can only determine after the session). It is not necessary or worthwhile to push to RPE 9-10 on compound movements in the context of rehab.