Trapezius Muscle Strain

So I often have “tightness/stiffness” in my lower neck, and upper traps. I get what feel like knots and using a lacrosse ball often helps the pain. I’ve read some of your material on pain and coincidentally enough, I’m listening through your podcasts and I’m on the pain/injury one next (episode 19 or 20 I think?). I usually have no problem training through this as it isn’t usually very painful. Once in a while I get what feels like a muscle strain, which happened this morning. I woke up and interlocked my hands above my head and pulled opposite directions and got a sharp pain in my upper right trapezius. I can barely move my neck either way without pain and certain other motions bring on the same sharp feeling. It feels as though my arms and neck are weaker because of this, but it is felt and not necessarily objectively weaker.

How does one go about dealing with strains? I don’t want to miss any training, but what is the best protocol in this situation? Any advice would be much appreciated. Love the content you guys put out!

Hey, sorry to hear about the neck symptoms. The best advice for a strain is keep moving to tolerance. Try performing some simple neck range of motion exercises such as slowly going through flexion (chin to chest), extension (looking up to the ceiling), looking left and right, and taking your left ear to left shoulder and right ear to right shoulder. Solid chance you will feel better after doing some easy movements and then attempt training to tolerance and modify accordingly.

@Stormin21Mormon
Sorry to hear about the neck issue. If you’ve been dealing with it for that long, might be worth a consult. Given you are able to train without issue but the next day notice symptoms, solid chance this is a load management issue.

Correct. My initial approach for such issues is to decrease external intensity (load on barbell) and assess tolerance.