How to heal a nagging shoulder pain??

I had a similar problem that I obtained from dumbbell incline benching. I wasn’t able to do bench press with my arms out to the sides without pain, so I switched to neutral grip and felt no pain at all. This hits the triceps more and the chest less, but still hits both enough to prevent atrophy while allowing your shoulder to heal. It took me a whole year to recover and now I’m back to benching with arms flared out to the sides with no pain at all. I did decide to not go back to free weight incline anything and just stick to machine incline. I still do flat bench free weights though because it doesn’t affect my shoulder like free weight inclines.

So basically, you need to find exercises that allow you to work around the injury without pain.

I don’t know what you may be doing other than overuse to cause this, so here’s a few things you need to make sure of:

1. Warmup properly. If you’re doing 3 working sets of 225X10 on bench, then do a few easy warmup sets nowhere near failure before getting into the working sets. Ex- bar X 25, 115X10, 135X10, 185X5.

2. Use proper form. Get someone to check your form or video yourself and compare to videos on YouTube.

3. Try to make your pulling muscles stronger than your pushing muscles so that there at no imbalances.

Some people advocate for stretching and rotator cuff exercises. I personally don’t see the use in either of them and they can both be counter productive. If you want to do rotator cuff exercises then do them after you’re healed to prevent injury, not to heal an injury, because it will make the injury worse.

You could also look into BFR (Blood Flow Restriction) exercises. May have to see a PT for that, but speaking from experience, it works really well.