Hi everyone,
I’ve been following bbm for a few years now. Suffered an injury (supposedly intercostal muscle strain) when I unracked the bar to begin squatting and tilted my upper body to the right side, backwards. This in turn, gave me a stabbing pain on the left side, slightly towards my back.
It hurt to breathe deeply and the pain lasted for about 6 months.
After the injury I figured, I’d keep lifting however I could. This in turn made me pull a muscle in my right side trap area and I’ve had varying degree of pain there ever since.
The weird part started after about 8 months since the first injury. While sitting at work (desk job), I noticed my abdomen, right around where the ribcage ends, getting tighter and uncomfortable. This feeling started off slow, about once a day for 15-30 min first, then increasing in frequency and time.
Same thing started to happen when I layed down to sleep. After about 15-30 min I got the same feeling but it was way worse and it felt like something was wrong with my heart. Crushing feeling, palpitations, sudden gasps that pulled me out of sleep because it felt like I was dying.
I went to check out my heart. Had an echochardiogram, usg for my organs, blood samples etc. Everything came back fine.
Living with this feeling for about a year or longer, I started to notice that when it woke me up at night, I tended to walk around my room and after a while I got to burp. It wasn’t easy to burp either, felt like something had tied down my throat/chest. It was also impossible to swallow air (I could do that on demand before).
In any case, I’ve been to a physio this summer and they told me I should work on my back and core muscles. Also, that my scapula were wonky - one was weaker or less/more retracted, I’m not great with anatomy.
I’ve kept doing the rubber band and light bodyweight back and core exercises and they have actually helped a lot. I rarely get the dying feeling anymore and its easier to burp.
What still bothers me is that whenever I lift something heavy - free weights or machines, the crushing ferling returns for a day or two, usually the day after tomorrow.
The worst culprit is chinups - that leaves me with an extremely tight feeling on the front left side under my ribcage. It even makes it harder to breathe in.
I have also started to do isolation exercises on machines in the 10-12 rep range and these seem to be tolerable.
My hope is that perhaps someone here has had experience with or heard of something similar and could shine some light on what is going on with me. The doctlrs here have not been successful at finding that out.
Best wishes
A person who likes to lift heavy things but can’t