Bicep/Forearm Pain

i am a 48 year old lifter. Started about a year and a half ago and love it. about 9 months ago i had a real bad cold and it weakened me. i went lifting with my trainer and over did it with curls. now i have unbelievable pain in my bicep and forearm . i mean red-hot pain when i lift and especially when i do a twisitng motion (like unscrewing jars).

i went to the doc and he gave me prednisone and capsaicin cream. i stopped using the arm and did back exercises that didn’t use the arm (much). my biceps lagged behind, but what could i do. the pain went away for the most part. but now it’s back. doc says it’s just tendonitis and i gotta get used to it. any thoughts?

You may have irritated your ulnar nerve in your arm from too much supinated curl work. If you are doing enough back work you don’t need to do more then a couple biceps exercises a week anyways.

gawd you are old. unfortunately, i am only 65% as old as you, and i have the same injury. it is my left forearm just at the elbow insertion point. i’ve been told deep tissue massage, ice, and possibly PT to resolve it. also unfortunately, i am really lazy, so i haven’t done it yet. i took 10 days off from lifting, and it feels better, but it still “is a pain”. on the plus side, i can still do chins/pullup w/o exacerbating it. in the meanwhile, i’m going heavy on fish oil, aspirin, vit C, and vit P.

Bastard

Do you have any tingling in the fingers on your hand?
Last year I had symptoms the mirrored a heart attack in my arm. Not the same as yours.
So that said have a muscle specialist check it. They can spot things you miss.

it would appear that you have biceps tendonites and it sucks.
you need to be careful as this can lead to or also be indicative of shoulder musculature imbalances.
remember that you dont really need direct upper arm stimulation for your arms to grow.
massage helps a lot for some people. i use a vibe type elec massager (heavy duty, as in percussive impact)and really press and knead the hell out of it with my left hand after the vibe massage.
you might consider physical therapy. the good part about that is that you learn how keep it from coming back. also i would consider a new doc if this guy is telling you that you just have to learn to live with it.
you may want to add MSM and Glucousimine Condroitine (sp) to your supps.
best of luck to you.

I have the same problem form time to time the easiest thing I have found is no curls .
I just relie on lat work to work my biceps
and back off for a couple extra days naproxen gives me the best pain relief and I take synflex {liquid gluc/cond}.see Waterbury’s advice for bicep work no curls

If your pain is about an inch or less coming from the bone knob on the inside of your elbow joint, and hurts when you grip things or do supinated curls, especially PREACHER BENCH, you probably have “golfer’s elbow” or medial epycondylitis. Treatments are ice massage, hyaluronic acid (wherever you get that), NSAIDS, ibuprofin or advil, and a doc will tell you to lay off doing whatever hurt it to begin with. (I BET it was preacher’s) But you don’t have to. I’ve been using cable exersizes and instead of gripping bars, wrapping my wrists with knee wraps up the forearms, and putting my hands through the padded velcro straps with the ‘D’ rings you hook to the cables. The glucosamine and Chondroitin with MSM haven’t worked yet, but I’m adding shark cartilage to it soon, and the cables have let me work out pretty heavy regardless. Good luck bro.