Pulled Chest Muscles
How Best To Avoid Pulled Chest Muscles
Pulled chest muscles are something best avoided. They can cause pain which varies from irritating to severe, the latter most often being the case. Suffering pulled chest muscles as the result of an accident or sudden movement can't always be avoided. This type of injury occurs most often among athletes, and those engaged in weightlifting or body building.
The latter group, the body builders are especially prone as a significant part of their regimen includes exercises involving the chest muscles. How an individual goes about preparing for, and executing, chest muscle exercises, goes a long way towards preventing pulled chest muscles. In truth, it is anatomically difficult, if not impossible, to pull a major chest muscle simply due to the way our bodies are constructed. It is far easier to pull a hamstring or calf muscle, simply due to the way these muscles are attached to bone and tendon. Partially because of the flexibility built into the bone, muscle, and tendon configuration in our chest area, pulling a chest muscle to the point that it actually tears or ruptures is not easily done. What happens is the chest muscles can be stressed or strained to the point to where the tendons they are attached to are damaged. What we think of as pulled chest muscles might be more accurately described as pulled or damaged tendons. Muscle or tendon, it still hurts bad!
Different Benches, Different Muscles - When doing chest exercises on an incline bench, a flat bench, or a decline bench, the angle your arms make with your chest depend upon which bench is being used, and the differing angle work different parts of the chest muscles. A bench press will exercise chest muscles very differently than will bar bell flyes. A barbell press will exercise chest muscles slightly different than dumbbell presses will, and so on. If one is not executing any of these exercise properly or is not properly warmed up, pulled chest muscles could be the result, with the damage differing somewhat depending upon the exercise during which something went wrong.
Five Common Sense Tips - The best ways to avoid pulled chest muscles are, (1) warm up properly so the muscles are warm and relaxed, (2) don't use heavier weights than you are used to handling, or set machine setting too high, (3) when using free weights, especially heavy dumbbells, make certain you can manage the weight and keep the path of the dumbbells under control, (4) ease off when fatigue sets in, making it difficult to control the weights, and (5) use a spotter when working with heavier weights. It's probably safe to say that more than a few instances of pulled chest muscles happen when someone is either trying to show off, or trying to set a personal record without having adequately prepared for the task.
Alternate Workout Patterns - A good body building regimen will normally work upper, mid, and lower chest muscles though a variety of different techniques. Most bodybuilding and weight training regimes work major muscle groups on alternate days, or every third day, and not every day. Working a major muscle group, such as the chest muscles every day does not give them an adequate chance to recover from the previous day's workout, especially if it has been a strenuous one, and such a practice can make the muscle group more susceptible to fatigue, eventually leading to an injury.
For those of us not actively engaged in weight training, pulled chest muscles are somewhat of a seldom occurring thing, for which we can be thankful. Still, when engaging in any strenuous physical activity, adequately warming up at the start can pay off big dividends as far as preventing these types of injuries is concerned.