Muscle imbalance question?

[-AJA14-]

Can muscle imbalance cause pain? Or is it just injured?

Background, I have been doing 5/3/1 for about 3 years. Have made great gains in strength. But my shoulder has hurt for a year. Went to the doc, he said I have a muscle imbalance and arthritis. gave me pills, then an injection and told me not to lift with the arm for 2 weeks. Still had a lot of pain after the injection.

The pain was under my scapula area, so while I was in the gym doing Bullshit workouts with my friends, since I couldn't train. I examined my assistance work and looked what i was weakest at in my back work. The answer was back width exercises.

So all my assistance work for dead day went to some kind of back width exercise. so 4 sets of 10 reps on 5 different back width exercises. Also on press day, I do rear delt flys and face pulls. Really trying to work on it. No rows. I used to do a lot of rows, for assistance work.

My pain has gone away a lot. I feel 70% better, I actually did press yesterday with very little pain. I still have some pain from the arthritis. I need to mention I took 5 weeks off last year, to see if it would help and it didn't.

[phoenix13]

IMO, yes, muscle imbalance can lead to pain. I've dealt with lower body imbalances which led to overcompensation, then overuse. Also, there was a snowball effect of things going further out of alignment due to the imbalance, which resulted in irregular wear of joints. Probably the most foolish thing I've done in my years of training has been neglecting to fix imbalances.