It's the barbell medicine podcast where we bring modern medicine to strength and

strength and conditioning to modern medicine. I'm your host Dr. Jordan

Figenbaum. This is episode 266, and today

we're going to talk about what happens when there's too much muscle breakdown, a condition

called rhabomyelysis. Now rhabdomylysis is a medical condition arising from a number of different causes, all of which lead to excessive breakdown of the muscle cell and release of the contents that are normally contained within the muscle into the bloodstream.

We're talking about things like potassium, phosphate, myoglobin

and calcium. These things are all released in large quantities into the bloodstream

causing serious potentially fatal complications. In today's podcast, we'll talk about what causes rhabomyelysis,

along with how it's diagnosed, treated, and how to avoid it.

And today, I'm joined by the second most handsome doctor in North America.

Dr. Austin Baraki, what's going on dude? Hey man, I'm feeling good.

Ready to do this thing.

All right, well let's start out with the clinical case to get the juices flowing.

All right, so this is a 35-year-old healthy female presents to her primary care physician 24 hours after a

cross-fit competition with worsening abdominal pain and swelling. Now if I just

stop right there what do you like if you're her PCP you see her and that's the only thing you know about her what's what's next?

Oh boy I mean abdominal just abdominal pain and swelling taking that at face value there's already a lengthy list now knowing that this is an acute presentation of this

narrows it quite a bit and then after exercise in a in a previously healthy person then of

course the topic of today's podcast is something that comes to mind if there's bleeding going on if there was like an undiagnosed, you know, pregnancy and an unknown breath and the complication from that there's just a long list of possible things that could be coming up in this scenario.

There's a 0% chance that she walks out of your office without getting a pregnancy test.

Zero percent. It's just absolutely no way. But in any case, this woman in particular will move down the case. We'll see what you say. She's 5 foot 1 132 pounds and she's been training for about five years four to five times per week. She has a back squat one rep max of 315 pounds.

Front squats 275 pounds.

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