Injured Back - Upper Body Exercise Help

acloern1985

So exactly two weeks ago I had a hard fall off of a horse I was riding - completely my fault- but I landed hard on my back. My muscles feel great, my x-ray was clean, but I have a lingering pain on my spine right between my shoulder blades. Pushing and pulling with my arms activates the pain on the spine, and while it is no longer excruciating pain (like it was for the first week), it is still bothering my slightly.

I would like to hear some ideas for upper body exercises I can do that minimally involve my arms. I've been doing running, lower body, and ab and core work for the last week but I feel like I'm not getting a complete workout.

Any ideas? Or should I just wait until all the pain is gone?

Cherimoose

The default advice with any injury is to ask your doctor.

That said, there aren't many options if pushing & pulling hurts. Bicep curls should be ok. The lat pulldown might work, and maybe bench dips and lateral shoulder raises

cafeaulait7

Do you mean lifts you can still do or just exercise in general?

I have the same problem, but chronic, and I do belly dance with no arms for general UB movement All the chest work uses the muscles near the bad mid-upper back area without triggering the arm raise problem. You'd be looking at chest isolations, circles, figure 8s, and undulations (check youtube). Hip drills do nothing for the UB, as you might imagine

For arms, you can still do work that mainly connects to the pecs, probably. Definitely avoid trap work or you might feel it! At least I do, but my problem involves 3 vertebrae, so your traps may not be as sensitive. I can also hit the delts now, but those are very isolated lifts to not use too much traps or rhomboids, etc. I even do a pullover that gets the lats now, so let me know if you are doing lifting and need ideas for a while while you heal. Good luck!