Chest Injury - Road to Recovery?

so my (left) chest (at pec and shoulder connection) has been injured for about 2 weeks now and i havent been able to train it, i struggle with just 1 plate.

im guessing its just strained and not torn since i cant recall any excruciating pain during any of my lifts…well no out of the ordinary excruciating pain.

so are there any ways i can speed up the recovery process?

If you can do overhead pressing without pain, keep that up.

Do a light, light, light movement like cable pec flies to keep blood flow going to the area. Eat well, sleep well, drink lots of water, and get some soft tissue work done on the area. Foam rolling is good, ART would be better. Pain is bad.

I’ve had a similar problem and now, after a 5 week lay-off of horizontal pressing, I’m able to do pain-free light benching and band pushups.

To get back into things, I’m going to reteach myself how to bench with an exaggerated ‘tear the bar apart’ queue, strengthen my tris like nuts, and widen my bench press grip width so my pec isn’t stretched so much at the bottom of the movement.

Take it slow getting back into things. When you get back at it, pay particularly close attention to bar speed on both sides. For me, my right side bar speed was slower than my left, so my right pec had to do more work and eventually gave way.

Give it time and you’ll be back at it. Good luck

[quote]Flow wrote:
If you can do overhead pressing without pain, keep that up.

Do a light, light, light movement like cable pec flies to keep blood flow going to the area. Eat well, sleep well, drink lots of water, and get some soft tissue work done on the area. Foam rolling is good, ART would be better. Pain is bad.

I’ve had a similar problem and now, after a 5 week lay-off of horizontal pressing, I’m able to do pain-free light benching and band pushups.

To get back into things, I’m going to reteach myself how to bench with an exaggerated ‘tear the bar apart’ queue, strengthen my tris like nuts, and widen my bench press grip width so my pec isn’t stretched so much at the bottom of the movement.

Take it slow getting back into things. When you get back at it, pay particularly close attention to bar speed on both sides. For me, my right side bar speed was slower than my left, so my right pec had to do more work and eventually gave way.

Give it time and you’ll be back at it. Good luck[/quote]

5 weeks?!!?? damn i hope i recover faster than that

[quote]LiveFromThe781 wrote:
Flow wrote:
If you can do overhead pressing without pain, keep that up.

Do a light, light, light movement like cable pec flies to keep blood flow going to the area. Eat well, sleep well, drink lots of water, and get some soft tissue work done on the area. Foam rolling is good, ART would be better. Pain is bad.

I’ve had a similar problem and now, after a 5 week lay-off of horizontal pressing, I’m able to do pain-free light benching and band pushups.

To get back into things, I’m going to reteach myself how to bench with an exaggerated ‘tear the bar apart’ queue, strengthen my tris like nuts, and widen my bench press grip width so my pec isn’t stretched so much at the bottom of the movement.

Take it slow getting back into things. When you get back at it, pay particularly close attention to bar speed on both sides. For me, my right side bar speed was slower than my left, so my right pec had to do more work and eventually gave way.

Give it time and you’ll be back at it. Good luck

5 weeks?!!?? damn i hope i recover faster than that[/quote]

Honestly, that was a very conservative approach. I could have probably been back in the gym after 3 weeks, because the pain was very much under control by then. Even so, I wanted to play it safe and took the interim as an opportunity to get stronger in push pressing and whatnot.

Edit: would’ve been more accurate to say ‘on the bench’ instead of ‘in the gym’.