hello, been around T-Nation for a while but as I had no questions or anything to say, didn’t see the point in joining.
been doing my current routine for about 3 months, just trying to get into doing proper form and get my joints ready and so on, I’m a right skinny runt just now but that’s going to change.
For over a year now, I’ve been having severe chest pains and never thought much about it to be honest till I found I had a REALLY bad history of heart problems in the family. Got it checked out and my heart is fine but the cartilage between my ribs and my breast bone is “inflamed” and can occasionally hurt like hell.
The Doctor said nothing about not exercising(I told him what I’m doing in the gym) but iv read on different forums that other doctors have said to stay away.
Truth be told I don’t want to stop going to the gym but I also don’t want to make this thing any worse. It can get damn painful at times. It never hurts in they gym, only at random times outside it.
So in short, anyone got any ideas on what to do? take time off or keep going? Anyone had it, continued training and felt like hell because of it? Or hopefully had it, trained and made it better?
I don’t want to turn into one of those lazy bastards that say "oh I don’t go to the gym because I have some tiny problem and exercise might make it worse . . . " or just use any and every excuse they can to avoid doing anything. They really piss me off.
For now I’m going to keep going, if it gets then il start taking pain killers.
I had that a few years ago and it went away after a while.
The main treatment is treating the inflamation. Sometimes restricting movement can reduce the severity of it. There should be no reason other than the pain to soldier through, just try to focus on exercises that don’t make it worse. Take something for the inflamation like fish oil (Flameout on this site) or something your doctor recommends.
similar symptoms, different cause.
liking the sound of pushing through it so will do just that unless I get some super warning not to. Just out the gym now and its fine so yay for that.
Will post back after a while saying if just going on as normal helped or not in case anyone else tries to find info about it on the site.
Was surprised there was nothing on it on here as apparently its most common in athletes.
Other than plyometric pushups and bouncing the barbell of your chest I don’t think a normal exercise routine would cause problems. I did some more reading on it and it seems that it normally resolves itself after a few weeks. It does reoccur in some cases. It doesn’t appear to be anything to be concerned over but it could mask heart problems so do keep vigilant.
If nothing you are doing in the gym, is directly leading to unusual soreness or pain in the chest area you described, then there shouldn’t be any reason to avoid the gym.
You may also want to try supplementing with fish oil which has been documented to help reduce inflammation. Hence Flameout being dubbed the “inflammation scavenger”.
cheers for the advice.
Should of mentioned i usual take 2000-4000mg of regular fish oil depending on if im going in the gym or not. (stuff from Holland and Barret, a fiver for 250x1000mg caps at the time. Pretty crap when you compare them to Flameout tho).
Still get random pains, but hey they will go away the day my heart plays up lol.