Hi guys,
I’ve been having this annoying shoulder issue for years now on and off where I’ll start getting stronger on bench and hitting a couple of PR’s and then all of a sudden my shoulders both start to get really achy, stiff and uncomfortable to the point where my bench starts getting weaker and then I have to spend a month or more building it back up to where it was and getting rid of the pain.
I used to have a similar problem with my knees and squatting but was able to fix this by introducing RPE and not grinding sets all the time. Having tried this with my bench I’m unfortunately still having issues.
I recently ran the 12 week strength template and bench was going great until the intensity started going up on the main sets (i’m fine with the singles at rpe 8) around week 7/8 (e.g. 5 sets of 3’s) and then the pain came back again. I ran into the same issue on the 7 week 4 day template although I think some of that was because I hadn’t fully dealt with the shoulder aggravation from when I ran the 12 week strength template.
This week I’m starting to do tempo bench as whilst I still have some minor discomfort during this it doesn’t seem to aggravate my shoulders so I’m planning on building that up to get back into regular benching pain free.
My issue is that when I get back to benching normally again I’m unsure of how to change the 12 week strength or 7 week hypertrophy templates in order to avoid having the same issue again. Is it worth limiting pressing to only 3x a week to see if the decreased volume/frequency might help? Or playing with the rep/set ranges in the later weeks so I don’t end up doing as many working sets in that higher average intensity range?
Any advice would be great, Thanks!