Not sure in which category to post this, it’s not an injury (yet), so here goes…
I train in the 3-5 range on bench press and during the lower portion of the lift but mainly during the press I feel a painful ribcage stretch. It’s annoying because I feel like I could do more reps but I rather re-rack the bar due to fear of cracking a rib or something.
Searching online has only pointed me to threads where people had previous conditions, which I don’t, or where the cause was bouncing the bar off their chest, which I don’t do either.
I don’t have a form video yet but my setup is pretty standard, chest up, shoulders back, a bit of space between lower back and bench, ass on the bench, legs pushing into the ground…
Any advice on what may cause this but more importantly, how to fix it?
Lifting on and off for a few years with breaks of various lengths in between, so my progress has been shit. About 2 months ago I decided to get back into it with full dedication, moved bench from 200, which was my previous max in the given rep range, to 225 in about 4 weeks.
The main portion of the pain stops after I re-rack, it stays kinda irritated for about 10 minutes after the exercise. Not to the extent where it limits other stuff I’m doing for chest but I can feel that it was stretched.
DB press (doing incline) 8-10 reps with 70 lb DBs is fine and flyes with cables cause no problem either.