Gym fiend’s arms ‘explode’ as he pulls up for Crossfit challenge: ‘It was a wake-up call’

She swelled – and not in a good way.

A South Carolina woman had to be hospitalized after her arms “exploded” while she was doing pull-ups for a high-intensity Crossfit routine.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” Jessica Johnson, 25, told the Kennedy News Agency of the disturbing incident, which happened last month. “I was definitely shocked and I didn’t know this could happen.”

The Charleston-based Crossfitter had reportedly been participating in the Murph Challenge, a cross-training regimen that involves running a mile, completing a circuit of 300 squats, 200 push-ups and 100 pull-ups, and then running another mile afterward .

This full-body quad went seriously wrong for Johnson during the withdrawal phase. “I was doing 10 sets of five pull-ups,” recalls the health care worker, who said she “left the gym pretty tired” after not training her arms like that “for a while.”

Indeed, the next day, Johnson’s arms were extremely sore and swollen—something she had never experienced before.

Despite being raised unnaturally, the gym bunny didn’t think anything of it at first. “I thought ‘I haven’t done pull-ups in forever, it was a tough workout, they’re going to come down, it’s good,'” the southpaw said.

But when she went to shower and brush her teeth, Johnson noticed she couldn’t straighten her arms all the way.

Meanwhile, her swelling went down over the next few days, with people comparing her to the Hulk.

“Everyone was like ‘we thought you were super weird or something’,” confessed the concerned exercise enthusiast, who noticed her pee had also taken on a “weird” tinge.

“It was darker, almost like an orange color,” Johnson said. “I was drinking tons of water, but I wasn’t peeing much during the day.”

It wasn’t until the exercise enthusiast lost feeling in her hands that she was finally reported to the hospital. Doctors reportedly took one look at Johnson’s arms and said she needed to go to the ER immediately.

Subsequent blood tests and other examinations revealed that Johnson’s extreme “swelling” was due to rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition where muscles break down and release toxic chemicals into the bloodstream.

Often caused by high-intensity exercise — which doctors were sure was the case with Johnson — rhabdo can result in organ failure and even death.

“In rhabdomyolysis your cells basically explode in your muscles,” Johnson said. “It’s like blood poisoning because your body can’t filter it out.”

Doctors reportedly opened the patient’s arms to relieve the swelling – a measure she thought was excessive at the time.

However, doctors were concerned about long-term kidney damage, which is a common complication of rhabdo that can force people to go on dialysis.

Shockingly, Johnson’s renal organs emerged from the incident unscathed.

“They (doctors) were very surprised,” she said. “They kept telling me ‘we don’t know how you don’t have kidney damage now with how high your values ​​are’.”

Johnson, who unfortunately suffered some liver damage, was released from hospital four days after being admitted and said she had made a “full recovery”.

However, doctors advised the fitness fanatic to wait a while before working out again and ease back into training instead of engaging in “crazy workouts”.

In light of her life-threatening ordeal, Johnson has called for a moratorium on doing the Murph Challenge, noting that she is more susceptible to rhabdo now because she’s had it before.

“That was a wake-up call for me to take it easy,” said the southerner, who plans to limit her exercise to running, walking and “softer pilates stuff.”

Johnson hopes to use her saga as a cautionary tale about the dangers of high-intensity exercise, explaining, “Exercising too much and doing too much aggressive exercise is not good for you and it’s not healthy.”

“You don’t need to be doing super intense stuff all the time,” she added. “It’s okay to do a little more of a relaxing workout.”

Named after US Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy who died in Afghanistan in 2005, the Murph Challenge is watched by thousands of CrossFit gyms every year.