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How's things, I've bein working out now a couple of months, fairly bad injured shoulder but have being doing rehab also. Ive made some good strength gains however the last couple of weeks I've bein getting headaches wen wring out. I'm not taking supplements and don't think I'm dehydrated. Only thing I can think of is that I've been going to the gym in the morning/afternoon rather than the late evening which I always used to. Any ideas?!!

Sorry to hear about your headaches! I feel for you because I dealt with terrible headaches for many many years until last year when I was finally helped by a chiropractor. Now, before ppl get all wierd about it, I did not need any serious manipulation and I have since been able to stop treatments with no relapse. The chiropractor assessed my neck and the muscles around my shoulders, head, and jaw. Basically he found that some of the muscles pretty much never relaxed. When I tried doing pull ups my headaches would go insane. I was so skeptical when I started trying to work out the headaches with this guy. I was thinking it was probably just like every other time I had been to a doctor and I have seen MANY. I even got a CT scan once just to be sure there wasn't a foreign object in my head.. haha.

Ok, long story short or kinda short.. The muscles had a very hard time relaxing. So, there was a certain technique this chiropractor used on my neck to break up scar tissue called the Graston Technique."The Graston Technique is a deep tissue technique that is used to straighten out knots in your muscle fibers. These knots occur when your bones become unbalanced and start to lean towards a certain side. The muscle on both sides of the unbalanced bone start to create scar tissue. The Graston Technique is used to slowly straighten out the scar tissue like you would straighten out a crumpled piece of paper." It hurt a lot the first few weeks but after a while all the tissue was broken up and it felt like it never had before. Here is a video that shows the basic idea. Of course the tools change as does its application depending on the location of the pain. These two videos will give you the basic idea of what this technique is. It is absolutely amazing!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2raU-YRojA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRM3-9sja-g&feature=related

In addition to this, I began massaging the muscles around my jaw as mentioned by my chiropractor. The chiropractor asked me if I ever leaned on my hand while reading or working at the computer and he was spot on. I realized that day when I got home that I would rest my head on my hand while reading and working and would even rest my head on my hand at times while sleeping. I would just kinda lean on it. I know a lot of people do similar things to this. He said that over time the jaw is pushed to the side and this causes various kinds of tension that can cause headaches from those jaw muscles being under constant stress. I began stretching my jaw and massaging the muscles. There are actually a lot of muscles around the jaw. They wrap around the top of your head and run under the jaw bone from your ear up to your chin. There is also a muscle inside your mouth that you can massage at the back. Its kinda hard to find without some help but its there. I massaged all those muscles by using intermittent pressure. So, 5-10 seconds on and then off. Now when I start to get a headache I massage those muscles with that same type of pressure and the headaches are gone.

Try this:
Open your mouth as wide as you can comfortably and apply some pressure just under the back part of your cheek bones. When you open your mouth this tightens up a lot. It is basically what stops you from opening your mouth any further. Those muscles are some of what needs massaged. So, open your mouth and find the tight muscles. Apply pressure as you close your mouth and feel them loosen. As they loosen you can apply a bit more pressure and may feel some pain. That pain is from the tense muscles. Another way to figure out if your jaw is too tight will be this: Look in the mirror while opening and closing your mouth. Open your mouth wide and close it. If your jaw moves side to side at all, you probably have at least some tension in those muscles. My jaw would move a lot when I first started. I just thought this was normal but its from the muscle tension. The jaw should more or less move freely without popping or side to side movement.
Another place to massage is the back and bottom of your jaw. Start at your ear where your jaw basically touches your ear. Apply a bit of pressure on the back of your jaw bone near your ear and then run your fingers under your jaw bone and towards your chin. You may find a lot of pain in this section of your face/neck. Those muscles can easily become very tense and can be massaged daily until the pain subsides. You can massage all the muscles running up the sides of your head and face as they are all kinda connected.

I am sure this isn't super clear as it's hard to imagine it without some video but I hope it helps some. Hope you can get some relief!

rhintz

All good information you have given there!

I have suffered some headaches before and quite often it's been down to tension in the neck. I can and do sometimes get some headaches after a heavy shoulder/trap session as the neck is indirectly trained during these exercises and can sometimes become tight.

I think he also said that he had suffered some shoulder injury, which could be a cause of the pain due to scar tissue build in the injured area causing referred pain in his head.