For the last 10 years or so I’ve been aware that my left shoulder had an issue with getting extremely sore when I would start working out after an extended period away from such pursuits. It would generally clear up after a week or so and I’d be able to progress ahead pain free. I always assumed it was some sort of bursitis situation and didn’t really think much of it.
Fast forward to around October of 2019 when I once again decided that it was time to move beyond just the treadmill for my fitness, and I started lifting a bit. Almost immediately the pain in my shoulder started, and after a week or two of working with weights the constant pain forced me to stop. I figured that I would simply wait it out before resuming my lifting, since it would assuredly cease quickly.
Around this time I also began to experience extremely sharp pains in my spine at the base of my neck while I was gaming, which I do fairly heavily once I get home from work, with epic sessions occurring on the weekends. This pain actually eclipsed the pain in my shoulder most of the time and would easily result in my laying on the floor to try to make it go away.
A month and a half of constant pain later Amily convinced me to see the physical therapist she was seeing.
It took about 20 minutes for the full diagnosis:
The pain at the base of my neck is 100 percent due to extremely bad posture while using the computer at home. At work I am far more likely to sit properly as well as get up constantly for normal work related demands. At home, the “comfortable” sitting would kick into high gear and that would usually result in acute pain as my shoulders would slump forward in a slouch and my head would tip forward with my chin jutted out just enough that it was the equivalent of forcing my neck to hold up a 40lb weight. Disk compression is no joke.
As for the shoulder pain? That is where the real stupid comes in.
In my extreme wisdom I had decided to focus on working my pecs and anterior deltoid (chest and front facing shoulder muscle) and my medial deltoid (middle facing shoulder muscle). What I wasn’t working on at all was my posterior deltoid (rear facing shoulder muscle) or my trapezius (back muscles).
Why this is important is that this exacerbated a pre-existing muscle imbalance on my left side that would normally be dealt with when I’d do full balanced workouts before. This imbalance caused the head (ball end) of my humerus (upper arm bone) that rotates in the shoulder socket to actually get pulled upward and forward so significantly that it is grinding on ligament and muscle and nerves and bone.
From an results perspective, the exercises I was doing were SUPER EFFECTIVE, and I have been paying for that ever since as the imbalance it caused has been extremely difficult to back out of.
I’d call this a rookie mistake, but I am simply not a rookie. I clearly didn’t know better, or at least didn’t apply what I knew in a way that would have mattered. This one just goes down as raw stupidity.
The silver lining on this however has been that it forced me to see a physical therapist that has been able to put me on the right track to address my posture issues, which were easily the more important of the two issues I had going on. I’ll never be able to stop with the posture exercises lest my body return to its own ways and I get the computer slouch again. As I get older, this could easily become something far more severe and far more permanent.
As for the shoulder, I’ll get through this imbalance eventually, and it is a mistake I can ensure I never make again. Truth be told that when I find that I want to avoid a balanced workout because I hate working out the opposite half of a muscle group, it likely means I REALLY need to focus on that group even more. The aversion is likely the red flag that they are already far weaker than they should be.