I had to cut my workout short today because when I was doing chin-ups I experienced a severe and sharp pain in my skull, I would assume that it was a blood vessel in the brain. This has never happened to me before (though I usually don’t do chins).
The pain would happen about half-way through my set and when I got down would be at its worst and lasted about a minute then got dull and left me with a mild headache.
Needless to say I was freaked out and decided to switch to a lat-pull down machine, but I just couldn’t get back into my workout and drove home, and took 8 Flameout pills (for blood thinning).
Has anyone else experienced this? Should I get to a doctor?
If you can feel a blood vessel in your brain then you better see a doctor right now. That may mean you have an aneurism. It could be something else or maybe just tension in the muscles around your head. But see a doctor to me sure.
I would not worry too much about it. It a frequently happening phenomena. I heard it referred to as the 20 squat headaches and it can usually be prevented by concentrating on your breathing.
Before I figured out how to prevent it I had it happen during chin-ups and leg presses and it was so bad that I had to abort the workouts those times.
Search “squat headache” and you will find other threads about this.
I have got head pain before from just pushing myself to failure. I mainly get it from doing high reps on exercises that take a lot out of you like as squats. I haven’t had this happen for a while because I haven’t trained high reps for a while.
I remember on a few occasions it would get so bad that I couldn’t stand up and would have to stay lying down on the ground for 15 minutes or so. It freaked me out too. I got a MRI of my head, and they found absolutely nothing. Nothing you can really do. Just make sure you’re breathing.
I had the same thing happen when I was deadlifting a while back. Sharp pain in my head…man it was bad, had to stop my workout and go home.
It went away but for a few weeks any time I did a exercise that required a bit of effort it came straight back. Went and had a CT scan on my head and was fine. About 3 weeks after I first got it, i was fine and it never came back.
Do a search on here…ALOT of people have had this same problem and it just goes away.
I still have a pretty bad headache but I think I just need to sleep it off, I figure if it were really serious I’d be dead by now anyway.
Now I have an excuse not to do chins for a while, but I think I just need to remember to breathe and maybe cut back on the coffee (might be dehydrating me).
If it keeps happening I’ll probably get my ass to a doctor.