Self Myofascial Release & Costochondritis

Hi Everyone,

I have some discoveries that I think may benefit others. Like a couple previous posters, I developed costochondritis as a result of hastiness in beginning ring work, particularly muscle-ups, ring dips, and ring supports. My sternal tendons were clearly not ready, as it resulted in costochondritis which has now been nagging me for the past year.

After the standard treatments (Fish Oil, Glucosamine, Chondroitin, MSM, heat, ice, rest, light stretching) combined with months of rest without direct chest work there was no improvement until I started using a softball to massage the tender spots on my chest and lats. Although direct massaging of the sore spots on the sternum is still quite painful, I noticed an incredible improvement almost instantaneously from massaging my lats (of all places!) and the pec minor.

Other people may have a different experience, but for what it's worth, it has been the only thing in the last year that has helped, and I can now feel my chest becoming slightly better daily from SMR work and daily pushups (which don't aggravate it in my case).

For context, my chest hurts during the following:

Back Lever

Muscle-ups

Dips

Ring Support

The more I puff out of my chest and pull my shoulders back and down, the less I feel pain. As a a result, I've put in a lot of extra pulling exercises on the horizontal plane (Inverted Rows, Cable Rows, Urgometer) to good effect.

I hope this post helps some other people suffering from the same problem!

Absolutely true! You will want to get a good trigger point resource, whether it is the trigger point therapy workbook or something equally as good so that you can hit all the referral sites. For example, my shoulder problems have been relieved by subscap, teres major, infraspinatus, biceps, corachobrachialis (or something like that), pec minor, pec major, and to a lesser extent lats. This also dramatically improved my shoulder mobility.

Manual therapy is often a huge help, because if you develop sternal pain it is most likely because of too much muscle tone (muscles are too tight) which causes a LOT more stress to be placed on the attachment sites. It's pretty wild.

As a followup - I have found another extremely effective way of managing costocondritis pain - at least in MY case: heavy bench presses.

Although bench press is usually counter-indicated in costochondritis cases, I have found that it helps the pain tremendously. This is because my pecs are excessively tight, and during a proper bench press, where the scapulae and pinched together and the chest propped out a lot, the pecs are stretched enormously and relieves the sternum of the pressure. Dumbbell flyes help as well.

Definitely something to consider for people suffering from chronic costochondritis. I'd highly recommend doing the bench press with strict form as discussed at length in "Starting Strength" by Mark Rippetoe.

This kind of pain is always the result of excessive passive tension in chronic cases. The SMR + active release stretches are excellent, and you could certainly have good results with benching if you are also handling the excessive tension.

Managing the passive tension and using active resistance exercise to apply temporary forces to the tissue will allow it to strengthen where it needs to without being constantly stretched by excessive passive tension. I hope your good results continue!

azey47, Are you still suffering from Costo?

I see your original post was done in Jan so I'm curious to know how much you think the massage has helped, were you able to get back on the rings?

I'm starting to work more with a tennis ball on my chest also. Plenty of very tender and sore spots, which I see as a good thing since I can do something about that. Whether getting rid of these trigger points will solve the issue for me completely is another question but I live in hope. Give me a knee injury over this any day.