Most of us don’t particularly care for pain and prefer to avoid it when possible. And no, when I say pain, I am not referring to listening to your neighbor's kid practice his oboe or filing your taxes. I am talking about the physical pain you feel with movement. How many of us really stop to ask ourselves if we are experiencing pain though? This article is directed to the people who have pain with sport or exercise but choose to continue training or competing.
My personal training goals focus on fitness with an emphasis on strength training. The grind of slowly seeing your body adapt and become stronger over time is an amazing and addicting process! In the beginning years of my training, I often fell into the trap of pushing through pain when I should have listened to my body. I regularly find myself tempted to fall back into the same pattern of pushing through pain in the pursuit of my goals.
However, as I slowly approach my AARP membership (and slowing metabolism) I am finding myself doing this less and less. Growth! It should be expected that the longer you train, the more setbacks you will face. This is where I see many people make mistakes in their training. One of the best things an athlete or someone pursuing fitness can do is learn how to manage setbacks and how to respond to your body not cooperating. This oftentimes presents itself in the form of pain.
So what happens when we start having pain with things that we enjoy doing? I like to compare pain to quicksand. Persisting to train through pain often makes the problem worse, burying the individual even faster. The relationship between our body in training and life is similar to any relationship; communication is vital for its success.
Our body uses pain as a major form of communication with us. We are simply being told that something is wrong. It is, however, important to recognize that this is not always a bad thing and is actually at times in our best interest! If our body has something going on that is not normal and could potentially be a problem, it is important for us to be aware of it.
Some things we need to consider when our body communicates pain are: first, do I need to start doing something differently, and second, do I need to seek help. In our culture it is seen as a good thing when someone can push through pain or has a “high pain tolerance”, but ultimately this attitude can slow a person's recovery and impair performance.
Research done by Dr. Kiesel (1) and a team at the University of Evansville helped highlight the importance of pain on our body’s function with a study looking at how our muscles react when pain is present. With this study, they were able to uncover that when pain is present, it alters the way our body uses our muscles. A simple way to think about this is to imagine the brain as a jukebox. When you are trying to perform a task you are essentially putting your quarter (or $10 bill nowadays) in the jukebox expecting it to play the song you want (i.e. the movement you are wanting). When we have pain, our brain plays the wrong song. This can make painful movements somewhat unpredictable and certainly risky.
This is manifested with changing the way our body uses our muscles and the way we move. Over time, continually doing the same painful activities over and over can wire our brain to just assume any time we do that activity we are going to have pain because that is what it is used to experiencing. This can become a dangerous cycle that can be challenging to break.
I personally went through a phase a couple years ago when I was struggling with pec pain during training. Back in college, I incurred a pretty bad pec strain not once, but twice on the same side within a little over a year. Let’s just say I was an idiot and I hope you can learn from my mistakes. Having been through this several times before, and admittedly, at times trying to push through it and not seeing any improvement, I decided to listen to my body and back things down.
I kept two exercises that I could do pain free if I modified them: bench press (with significantly less weight than I would normally use and an adjusted grip) and isometric push-ups (pausing at the bottom and the middle of the motion for a few seconds). Dropping anything else that would overstretch my pec, I eliminated all other chest exercises for a little over two months, slowly adding weight back on the bar as my body was able.
Within 10 weeks I went from really struggling with the bench press to hitting an all time PR. It wasn’t because of some crazy training program. It was purely because I gave my body time to heal and become pain free. When you remove pain, you take the parking brake off of your performance capabilities and set yourself up for much more success in the long run.
All of this highlights the importance of listening to your body. When we are experiencing pain or feel exceptionally fatigued, it is our body communicating with us that something is not right. We need to listen, allow our bodies the rest it needs or seek medical help. The last thing we want to do is exacerbate the problem and end up like the man buried in quicksand fighting himself into a deeper and deeper hole. If you are pushing through pain, no matter how small, please come see me or reach out online. I would love to help you get back to doing what you love to do!
References
Kiesel KB, Uhl T, Underwood FB, Nitz AJ. Rehabilitative ultrasound measurement of select trunk muscle activation during induced pain. Man Ther. 2008;13(2):132-138. doi:10.1016/j.math.2006.10.003
