Huge sudden loss of strength/stablity on bench press

[Ericreichelt81]

Any help would be greatly appreciated with this. About two weeks ago i ran an odd job at work that made me rotate a fixture with just my left arm for the night. So a was in the mood to bench and as I worked up I got pinned by 160. I've since rested and benched again last night and 160x5 is an rpe10. My elbow is flaring out and in general I'm all fucked up. I then worked up to 160x5 in behind neck push presses then though I'd try Dumbell bench to see if there was any change. Huge fail, with 50's my left arm was only using my shoulder to press. I felt zero activation in my chest, like it just wasn't firing out of the bottom. I'm very confused. I have no pain whatsoever and my strength feels balanced overhead. Please help. Thank you all.

[Christopher Anderson]

I'm not sure you finished telling us what's wrong?

[Ericreichelt81]

Thank you.

[acelticmonk]

A while back I got pinned, had to dump the weights off the sides and have another lifter help me out of the predicament. I tweaked my shoulder a bit in the process and that took a while to recover from, but the main issue was that my head wasn't in the game for bench for the next month. I was scared, and it took a good four weeks to convince my brain that I wasn't going to die under the bar. I could think positive thoughts, but my body would tense and not respond well under the bar.

You may have a similar combo of tendon tweak and fear.

[Ericreichelt81]

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't pinned by the weight for sake of it being a heavy load, it's a warmup weight. It's just that my left arm simply doesn't feel like it knows what I'm asking it to do. For reference, if I warm up to an say an rpe8 for a single it's usually between 215 and 235, depending on motivation level. So 160 is very alarming and after 3 sessions it is not improving.

[Frankie]

Sounds like another case of the AIDS

[Ericreichelt81]

Time will tell..

[acelticmonk]

Ah, gotcha. Well in that case, I don't know

[Ericreichelt81]

Ya, it's odd. I guess I'll just use light db's until it corrects itself.