Re-injured Left Pec

The following message was posted in the Weight Trainer's United forum and on my MySpace page.
It is a follow-up to Physical Therapy Update and Plans.

Monday (8/10/09) was my first workout since I injured my hamstring almost three weeks ago. It was a bench assistance workout, where I was doing dips then DB presses. As I was doing my first warm-up set for dips, I felt a little a slight pain in my left pec. I couldn’t believe it and had no idea what to do. Should I just end the workout right there? I decided to keep going, but went even easier than I had planned.

What I think happened is, on my fist exercise of the day I usually do a set with just the bar for 15 reps to get warmed up, and then increase from there, But then on subsequent exercises I’ve found I don’t need to start quite so light. But with dips, the lightest I can go is bodyweight, which is actually pretty heavy. I usually I do dips as my second exercise, after something like incline benches, so am already warmed up and bodyweight dips are not too heavy. But doing them first made that first set too heavy for a first warm-up set.

The reason I wasn’t doing inclines first, as I posted previously, was I didn’t want to risk carrying my FID bench in and out of my power rack due to my hamstring injury. So that injury led to another! The next day, my pec was hurting some, but not too bad. But I will now have two injuries to rehab, one to my lower body and one to my upper body, so that ends any possibility of hard lifting for some time.

I’ve had problems with my left pec on and off for years. In the spring I was doing DB flyes, and that seemed to help, and it felt fine at my contest in June. So I guess I will need to do flyes on a regular basis from now on. On my bench assistance workout, next time, I’ll switch things around and do the DB presses first. Hopefully, that will be enough warm-up that bodyweight dips won’t be problematic.

To say I am getting frustrated is an understatement. I feel like my body is really breaking down, and I am not sure what is happening. Maybe all of my health problems are catching up to me, and this could very well be the end of my competitive career. But I will keep trying and see what happens.

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