Mean Ol Mr Gravity

[mattjames]

Hi Coach,

Thanks for your reply to my last, I have another if I may. I expect there will be many more .........

I was just reading Mean ol Mr Gravity and there is a point on the Deadlifting and Shoulder Impingement thread where you say in reply to someone "If the bench press doesnt bother the shoulder, chances are it's not going to make it heal either"

Any chance you can elaborate on this as I often also see you tell people to drop the bench if hurts their shoulder. Just wondering what you base the decision on and why sometimes trainig through pains helps and other times it doesnt. I am still strugglng with shoulder pain but can so far bench through it without too much trouble. I found this intriguing!

Thanks

[Mark Rippetoe]

Context is very important. What is the source of your shoulder pain? Diagnosis?

[mattjames]

Hi Coach,

We did my shoulder issues a while back on a different thread. It was some kind of ac joint/impingement pain. MRI showed inflamation of the bursa amd a slight thickening of a something, doc did cortisone shot that did nothing. UK based so did all the usual physio but did nothing ( hence the interest in your sh*t docs say podcast, as they said most of it to me, no heavy lifting, no overhead work, light weights high reps, only therabands etc). In the end nothing was working so I though f!*k it and just started training again with a reset. Pain hasnt improved much day to day but it doesnt really hurt to train either, in fact, it temporarily feels slightly better after the warm up and the work out!! I wasnt trying to resurrect that honest, you can trust me, I am not a doctor

I was just really interested in the quote about if it something doesnt hurt then it wont help cure. I thought that was an intriguing notion and wondered what was behind that in general, rather than at me specifically. Is working through pain and casuing further inflamation a way to bring extra blood to an area a way to help expedite fixing something or is this based on something entirely different.

Thanks

[Mark Rippetoe]

In a general sense, if your foot hurts, it won't help to work on your hand. Specifically, the idea is that inflamed tissue is edematous, and that massage or other pressure, as from working the area through its ROM, pushes the fluid out of the tissue, enabling the inflammatory process to more effectively heal the lesion.