The next major red flag we have to cover here is a discrepancy between your overhead press and bench-press. If you can press close to your body weight on an overhead press but can't bench press 1-½ times your body weight, your chest muscles are weak.
There are many possible causes of a heavy feeling in the chest. It can happen due to mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression. Other possible causes include GERD, pericarditis, angina, pneumonia, collapsed lung, costochondritis, and gallstones.
Chest pain symptoms due to a heart attack or another heart condition may include: Pressure, tightness, pain, squeezing or aching in the chest. Pain that spreads to the shoulder, arm, back, neck, jaw, teeth or upper belly. Shortness of breath.
It usually feels like pressure, and can often radiate to the arm, neck or jaw. It's not the only sign though, and women especially are prone to experiencing other symptoms, like fatigue, nausea and shortness of breath. Chest pain can also signal other heart trouble.
Shortness of breath: It's not normal to experience shortness of breath that doesn't go away after exercising, or that you have after little or no exertion. Labored or difficult breathing—the feeling that it is hard to breathe in out—is also a warning sign.
GERD can cause chest pain that mimics a heart attack. Described as a squeezing pressure behind the breast bone, GERD-related chest pain can last for hours. And like a heart attack, it can also radiate down your arm to your back.
This condition, called stress cardiomyopathy, mimics a heart attack, from symptoms all the way down to changes in your heart's electrical activity. Though stress cardiomyopathy usually heals within a few days or weeks, it may lead to weak heart muscles, congestive heart failure, and abnormal heart rhythms.
Shortness of breath does not always indicate that you are hypoxic. In other words, your level of dyspnea, or air hunger, does not always correlate with your oxygen saturation. This means that you can be short of breath, even extremely short of breath, even in the presence of normal oxygen saturation.
Home Remedies for Chest Tightness
Warm Compress: By using a warm compress on your chest, you can loosen muscles and reduce tightness. You can use a hot water bottle or a warm towel for this purpose. Make sure the compress is warm, not hot, to prevent burns.
A gadget called a peak flow meter lets you do that. You hold it in your hand and blow into it as hard as you can to get a measure of the greatest airflow rate you can produce. About 600 liters per minute is normal for the average man, and 370 liters per minute for the average woman.
Tea and Diet: Incorporating antioxidant-rich teas like green tea and chrysanthemum tea can help reduce inflammation in the lungs and improve overall lung health. Foods rich in vitamins, such as leafy greens, apples, and beets, also support lung function.
The most common causes are tobacco use and asthma. Other common causes include fluid that drips from the nose down the back of the throat, called postnasal drip, and the backward flow of stomach acid into the tube that connects the throat to the stomach, called acid reflux.
Stress, exercise, medication or, rarely, a medical condition can trigger them. Although heart palpitations can be worrisome, they're usually harmless. Rarely, heart palpitations can be a symptom of a more serious heart condition, such as an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia), that might require treatment.
One significant indicator of a weak chest is the tendency to allow your shoulders to drift forward ahead of your chest during the bench press. This compensation often becomes more evident as fatigue sets in.
Dehydration can cause chest pain and heart palpitations
When you're dehydrated, your heart compensates by pumping faster and working harder. Your blood may also thicken due to the lack of water, making even more work for your heart. All that extra work can cause chest pain, especially for people with heart disease.