Does collagen help shoulder pain from bench press?

Four suspects sorted by where and when: the rotator cuff, the long head of biceps, the acromioclavicular joint and the pectoralis major tendon

Does collagen help shoulder pain from bench press is a question that cannot be answered until the shoulder has been sorted, because the bench press loads four different structures at four different points in the lift and collagen's lane covers two of them, and the honest page sorts by the two things a reader already knows, where it hurts and when in the lift it hurts, which between them name the suspect more often than not. The first suspect is the rotator cuff, and specifically the supraspinatus, the tendon that runs over the top of the shoulder joint and under the bony arch of the shoulder blade, which is the hardest tendon in the body to heal for the four reasons on the hardest tendon to heal page. Its pain is on the top and outer aspect of the shoulder, sometimes referred down the outer arm toward the deltoid's insertion, and it is worst at the bottom of the bench press, when the arm is abducted to the side and rotated outward and the elbow is flared wide, the position in which the tendon is pinched between the head of the humerus and the arch above it; it hurts with reaching overhead and behind, aches at night when the reader lies on it, and is the commonest bench press shoulder by a distance, a tendinopathy of the cuff made by the capacity gap on the get rid of tendonitis page, a load rising faster than the tendon could adapt. The second suspect is the long head of biceps, the tendon that runs from the top of the shoulder socket down the front of the humerus in a bony groove. Its pain is at the front of the shoulder, in the groove, tender to a single finger pressed over the front of the humerus with the arm slightly rotated, worst at the bottom of the lift when the arm is stretched back and with a wide grip that pulls the tendon across the groove's edge, and it hurts with curls and with reaching behind the back; it is a tendinopathy too, and sometimes an instability of the tendon in its groove, which a clinician can feel. The third suspect is not a tendon at all. The acromioclavicular joint is the small joint on the very top of the shoulder where the collarbone meets the shoulder blade, and its pain is exactly there, on the bony point a reader can touch at the top of the shoulder, worst at lockout when the arms are straight and the shoulders are pressed forward, worst when the arm is reached across the chest to the opposite shoulder, and provoked by wide grips, by full range dips and by heavy pressing generally, since the joint takes compression at the top of every press; it is a joint whose cartilage wears and whose capsule strains, which responds to unloading and to range limits and which a clinician diagnoses with the cross-body test and sometimes an injection, and nothing on the tendon shelf applies to it. The fourth suspect is the pectoralis major tendon at its insertion on the arm, and it is the one that must not be mistaken for the others: a tearing or popping sensation at the front of the armpit during a heavy set, especially at the bottom of the lift, followed by bruising spreading down the inner arm and chest over days, weakness pressing and bringing the arm across the body, and sometimes a visible change in the contour of the chest when the muscle is tensed, which is a strain or a rupture of the tendon, commonest in men lifting heavy and on anabolic steroids, and a surgical question in the first weeks for a complete rupture, before the tendon retracts beyond reach, that no programme or supplement addresses.

The bench fixes that unload all four, the loading programmes for the two tendons, where collagen sits and where it does not, and the worked example

The bench fixes that unload all four suspects are the same four changes, and the honest page gives them because a reader who makes them has treated the cause while the diagnosis is being sorted. The grip comes first: the biomechanical studies find that a grip wider than around one and a half times the distance between the shoulder's bony points raises the torque on the shoulder and the risk of injury, by abducting the arm further at the bottom and pulling the biceps tendon and the acromioclavicular joint into their painful positions, so a grip at or inside one and a half times shoulder width, which for most lifters is a little inside the ring marks, unloads the cuff, the biceps and the joint at once at a small cost in chest emphasis. The elbow comes second: an elbow tucked to around forty-five degrees from the torso rather than flared to ninety takes the arm out of the abducted, externally rotated position that pinches the supraspinatus, and is the single change that most relieves a cuff shoulder. The arch comes third: a modest arch of the upper back, with the shoulder blades pulled back and down and held there, lowers the shoulder's effective abduction at the bottom of the lift and gives the humeral head room under the arch, which is why a retracted shoulder blade is coaching orthodoxy and not vanity. The range comes fourth: stopping the bar a fist's width short of the chest, or pressing from a board, pins or the floor, removes the last few degrees of the bottom position where all three of the cuff, the biceps and the pectoralis tendon are most stretched and most loaded, and dumbbells, which let the hands turn and the elbows find their own path, and incline pressing, which changes the shoulder's angle, are the variants that let a reader keep pressing while a structure settles. Those fixes bring the load under the suspect's capacity, and for the two tendon suspects the capacity is then raised by a loading programme, which is where collagen sits. For the cuff, the programme is external rotation and abduction work with a band or light dumbbell, isometrics for pain, progressing to heavy slow resistance of the cuff and the scapular muscles every second or third day over months, with the bench reintroduced by the fixes above and by tests; for the biceps, it is isometric holds and slow heavy curls and eccentrics over the same months. Collagen's pre-loading protocol belongs beside those sessions, 15g of gelatin or collagen with vitamin C about an hour before the loading, on the strength of the synthesis marker it raised in healthy men and the one small Achilles tendinopathy trial beside calf strengthening, with no trial in any shoulder tendon and nothing to offer the acromioclavicular joint, which is cartilage and capsule, or the pectoralis tendon tear, which is a surgeon's; the squat as an examination of the knee on the knee pain from squats page is the same sorting one joint down. A shoulder that hurts at night, that cannot lift the arm after a pop, that bruises or that has lost strength is a clinician's shoulder before it is anyone's programme. The worked example is the adjunct for the two tendon suspects at habit scale, stated on its true terms: two capsules, 1200mg hydrolysed type 1 marine collagen with 12mg vitamin C at 15% of its reference value plus zinc, 120 for £16.99 at 28p a day, lab tested and UK made, below the 15g protocol dose, carrying vitamin C's collagen formation sentence for cartilage and bones and no tendon or shoulder claim. Does collagen help shoulder pain from bench press: sort the shoulder, fix the bench, load the tendon if it is a tendon, and place collagen before that session as an adjunct with no shoulder trial, and nowhere for the joint or the tear.

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