Pressman’s Compensation

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—2/6/12—Men love to lift weights—especially from a bench. There are few acts quite so gratifying to the typical male ego as is the repetitive lowering and re-hoisting, in a recumbent position, of an inordinate amount of iron from the extent of the reach of one’s arms to one’s chest. The press is one of three lifts featured in classic power-lifting competitions.

But most of those who bench press eventually come to grief. They damage the four small muscles that form the celebrated rotator cuff.

More precisely, they damage the tendons of these muscles at the point where they wrap around, or “cuff,” the ball of the humerus, or arm bone.

The damage arises essentially because the bench-press action engages both large and small muscles.

The large muscles are principally the pectoralis (chest), the deltoids (shoulder) and the trapezius (neck). They provide most of the power for the lift.

But in the traditional bench press—a lift done with free weights on a bar—before this power can be exerted, the bar must be balanced just after it clears the chest on which it almost rests and before it is re-hoisted. This balancing act recruits the action of those small rotator-cuff muscles—the subscapularis, the supraspinatus, the infraspinatus and the teres minor.

Here’s where the trouble comes. The amount of weight the typical testosterone-pumped male chooses to bench is governed by the size of his large muscles, which, being the showiest, are those that he takes most pride in developing. As a result, these muscles tend to be overdeveloped, relative, that is, to the four small and far-less-visible balancing muscles.

This strength gap, as it were, is what causes most injuries. At some level of bench-press weight escalation, the poundage chosen for pressing, while within the capacity of the large muscles, exceeds that of the neglected small muscles, the tendons of which promptly proceed to fray or snap.

And once injured, they stay injured. That’s because, being just tendons, they get comparatively little blood flow with which to heal.

So it’s an end to bench pressing or a trip to the orthopedist for surgical repair of the cuff.

As the reader may have surmised, I have experienced all of the above—except for the operation by the orthopedist, a medical specialist against whom I hold a most disproportionate amount of animus.

And although I no longer bench press, I still lift fairly formidable amounts of weight.

I do so by changing the type of lifts so as to compensate for the loss of the affected tendons.

My bench-press injuries were to the subscapularis and teres minor muscle tendons.

To offset the subscapularis damage, I have overbuilt the anterior deltoid that envelops it.

To offset the teres minor damage, I have overbuilt the enfolding teres major muscle.

My compensatory actions are so successful that I feel that I am stronger, as I approach my 80th year, than I was 30 years ago.

And I never miss the bench press.

Well, hardly ever.