Upper Back/Trap Pain

About a week or so ago I got a deep tissue massage, awesome right? The woman who I’ve gone to in the past basically took apart my upper back and put it back together. I had a lot of knots/tension etc. I was sore but otherwise fine. Three days later I trained upper body with the focus of my workout being an overhead press/some arms. Barbell push presses, dumbbell overhead presses, and laterals + some arm work.

During the workout I felt tremendous pressure in my shoulders/traps. Long story short, I was basically crippled the following day and for 3-4 days afterward with fairly severe pain in my lower trap/behind my scap sort of closer to the spine. I also spent most of the week wearing my shoulders next to my ears. I don’t know what the cause of this pain was.

I took about a week off from training upper body and went in today feeling fine and did a similar workout (overhead press). The pain is back.

Obviously if the problem persists the best advice would be for me to see a physical therapist. I’m just wondering if anyone has experienced something similar and has any recommendations.

I’ve been icing the area but it’s very hard to get to the center of the pain as it feels like its deep behind my shoulder blade. It’s frustrating because I don’t know what I did to cause this (if anything.) I’m sure my lifting form isn’t perfect but I know it’s not THAT broken either and has never caused this problem in the past.

Thanks!

I would maybe check out ‘rib disfunction’

I’m not saying you have this, as it’s really not a good idea to diagnose these things over the internet! But it COULD be that the massge loosened some things up and then you ‘dislodged’ something during training.

I’m not an expert, but I have had this and the pain was similar to what you describe, kind of under and around the scap, it felt muscular and my traps were really tight and ‘up’ during this too.

Maybe get it checked out by a osteopath/chiro. You could also pm Bushy, he’s great with all this stuff.