Gym junkies arms explode while doing pull-ups for Crossfit challenge: This was a wake-up call

She got swole — 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 Kennedy News Agency of the distressing incident, which occurred last month.“I was definitely shocked and didn’t know that 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 quadrathlon went seriously awry for Johnson during the pull-up phase.

“I was doing 10 sets of five pull-ups,” recalled the healthcare worker, who said she “left the gym pretty tired” as she hadn’t worked out her arms like that “in a while.”Indeed, the next day, Johnson’s arms were super sore and swollen — something she had never experienced before.Despite getting preternaturally pumped up, the gym bunny initially didn’t think anything of it.“I thought ‘I haven’t done pull-ups in forever, it was a hard workout, they’ll go down, it’s fine,” the Southerner said.But when she went to take a shower and brush her teeth, Johnson noticed that she couldn’t straighten her arms all the way.

Meanwhile, her swelling snowballed over the next few days to where people compared her to the Hulk.“Everyone said ‘we just thought you were super jacked or something,'” recounted the distraught exercise enthusiast, who noticed that her pee had turned a “weird” hue as well.

“It was darker, almost like an orangery color,” said Johnson.“I was drinking tons of water but I wasn’t peeing much during the day.”It wasn’t until the workout buff lost feeling in her hands that she finally reported to the hospital.

Doctors reportedly took one look at Johnson’s arms and said she needed to go ...