Shoulder Pain

[=Janz=]

40 year old male, 6'1", 200lbs. Novice lifter.

I've been dealing with some pain in my right shoulder when doing bench presses and seated OHP's. (Basement ceiling is too low to do standing OHP's.) I've tried to work through the pain -- which is often considerable as the weights get heavy -- but especially with the OHP's the pain causes imbalances and eventually failure. I've tried warming it up, stretching it out, doing accessory stuff (dips, LTE's) massaging the irritated tendon... All of these things seem to help it feel better, but when the weight gets heavy it still screams out.

A local chiropractor did a series of tests on me by asking me to provide resistance to him pushing on my arms from a variety of angles. We found that both sides were rock solid -- up until I could provide virtually NO resistance to him pushing my right hand back toward my thigh (pinky turned out, arm straight out about 45 degrees).

He said this was indicative of a supraspinatus injury and that I could do any (or all) of the following:

1) Let him grind away on it here and there.
2) Get an MRI.
3) Use light weights and do higher reps for a month or three until it heals up.
4) Use Therabands.

He specifically suggested #'s 1, 3 and 4, stating that he didn't sense it was severe enough to warrant surgery -- yet he admitted that an MRI would be much more conclusive. Any advice would be appreciated.

[veryhrm]

This isn't, imo, the kind of thing that you can work THROUGH because there's no "other side". If your form is bad somehow, and you fix it ... then that would be a change that might allow the thing to heal, just keeping on as is will likely just make things worse so you have to do SOMETHING to fix it.

If he said an MRI might be useful, and if you can afford it, then do it.
You can also do 1,3 and 4.

To reiterate, what i wouldn't do is just ignore it because then you'll prob just end up damaging it, whatever it is, worse or at least ingraining bad movement patterns as your body tries to work around the damaged part.

obviously also search the board (via google) for various other shoulder problem threads to look for more specific examples.

(i'm not a doctor or a coach and this isn't advice of any sort)