Pinching Style Pain in Traps when Bench Pressing

[Slayer of Souls]

The pain started around one and a half months ago while on the decline bench press. I was training for strength and using progressive loads.

The pain would only occur in my right trap while bench pressing (flat/decline) pain, however was minimal while doing incline barbell press. It feels like a sharp pinch right in the center of my traps. Even training light I do feel the pain.

Not sure if this is related but when I rotate my arms in a wide circular motion I get a loud and distinct clicking noise in my right shoulder.

There is no pain when I do any other sort of lift, dead lifts, or shoulder work. Just on bench.

I did see a physio in my country, which isnt of the highest standards. According to him it was just a few tense fibres. But this pain has been for over a month and I even stopped lifting for two weeks and the pain hasnt subsided yet.

Any ideas?

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[vam44]

There are quite a few things that could be going on here because the trapezius is involved in both the neck and the shoulder functions. You could have injured the joint between the first rib and the spine because the first rib lies directly beneath the upper trapezius.

An alternate source of the pain and click is due to the deep surface of the scapula rubbing up against the ribs just at certain positions.

To fix ( and this is just a guess as we cant really examine you) It would be worth doing your strengthening in prone on the bench and working on very slowly letting the weight down ie eccentric strengthening of the rhomboids and doing lots of stretches to the upper trapezius and scalene muscles.

I would encourage you to sort this out properly as you may be doing long term damage to the rotator cuff tendons if you are overtraining some muscles but undetraining others and giving yourself a muscle imbalance issue.