This week we are going to break down load management. Tell me if this sounds familiar: It’s the third week in a row you’ve flat barbell bench pressed (twice/week). Your shoulder joint starts to hurt. You begin rolling out your shoulders and doing some banded work before your pressing days. Week 4 rolls around and it has not gotten worse, but it has not gotten better.
You decide to schedule a massage and some other rehab work (that will run you about $60/hour). It’s week 5 now and you are supposed to be working up to a max triple. You get about 4 sets into your warmups before the pain is so aggressive you almost get stapled, then leave the gym in a tiff because the day did not go how you wanted.
What was the big mistake in the situation above? Assuming that the answer to the pain was adding more to the training schedule. It is a common conundrum to assume the simplest answer can’t be the right one; the irony being, that it often is. The notion that you can out-warm up or out-exercise the need for recovery is appealing. The idea that all it takes to be the strongest version of yourself is to slam the gas pedal down and forget about it is false. If it was as easy as going 100mph all the time, there are a lot of crazy fuxks I know that should rightly be much stronger.
No, the answer to reducing chronic pain as a result of training stress is not to add more stuff; it is load management and exercise selection. I submit that perhaps benching twice a week on a straight bar with high volumes (might) be too much for (some) individuals’ shoulder joints to handle. There is a lot of nuance I’m going to leave off the table here as it is not relevant to the point at hand, which is; that adding more training volume to solve an issue that arises due to too much training volume is ridiculous.
The next time you are experiencing chronic pain as a result of training, I encourage you to look at your program with some clarity and objectivity. Are you doing too much? Are there some movements that take a bigger toll than others? Are some movements causing overlapping soreness in some muscle groups? Have you ever heard of the concept of a deload?
If the answer to any of these is “yes”, then maybe move some things around, remove some sets, reps, or load, or even remove an entire movement for a week just to see how it affects the aforementioned pain. I promise the answer to getting better is not in some banded exercise or super secret warm-up; it’s more than likely a combination of eating enough, reducing training volume, and getting some sleep.