Dealing with Pain? Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Skip Training
Trust me, I get it…. Pain sucks.
It can make you timid, worried, and scared to do anything. The natural reaction is to do nothing and just rest. Unfortunately, we often receive professional advice and peer social pressure to follow this natural inclination.
I'm here to tell you, though, that this is often not the best path forward. Let's discuss three reasons why you should keep training even though you are struggling with pain and discomfort.
1. You need to maintain your overall body function and capacity.
The biggest fear I have for people who get hurt or have chronic pain is not so much the actual pain region or injury itself. It’s the decrease in overall body function and capacity that typically happens.
I see it all the time. Someone I know gets hurt, and then they rest… for a really really long time. Now not only does that region that is affected keep getting worse, but so does the rest of the body. This has enormous consequences in reduction in overall capacity, impacting their strength, cardiovascular fitness, mobility, and power leading to a gradual regression in quality of life and possible further and/or different injuries at different sites.
Avoidance of training is such a slippery slope, and this leads us to the next point.
2. You can train around pain. There is always something you can do.
Even with traumatic injuries, there is so much you can do. At Thrive, we work with so many people who are dealing with big things, but we don’t let it stop us from getting a good hard training session.
Last year, we had an athlete who had a staggered bilateral hip surgery (got surgery on one hip, then 6 weeks later got surgery on the other). He would train hard 3x per week with us, barely leaving the table. We smashed his upper body to maintain his upper body strength and then used upper body conditioning methods, like battle ropes and rope sled hand-over-hand pulls, to do what we could to maintain his cardiovascular system.
I could give a hundred examples of how we have done this with different people at the gym but I want to keep this a short read and we have a lot to get through in the next section.
The simple message is that in most situations, there is always a way forward.
3. Pain doesn’t always mean damage. In a lot of situations, you should train through it.
Pain is neither bad nor good. It’s an experience that is felt by every human on this earth today and those before us. In some cases it’s a warning sign, but it doesn’t always mean something is wrong either.
At the surface level, pain can feel easy to describe and understand. In reality, pain is such a complex experience influenced by our cognitive, emotional and contextual experiences.
In 1995 there was a report from the British Medical Journal of a 29-year-old builder who’d suffered an accident after jumping onto a plank. A 7-inch nail had pierced his boot, poking out the top. The man was in incredible pain, needing to be sedated and taken by stretcher to the emergency department. Once there, doctors removed his boot to discover the nail had passed between his toes, resulting in no damage at all.
We as humans typically associate pain with tissue damage. However, in the above example, this individual had extricating pain but no tissue damage at all.
This means we can not say that pain is bad, means you're injured or that individuals must avoid painful things.
If you’ve spent time outdoors below freezing, particularly without gloves, and then gone inside and washed your hands, you’ve seen how it hurts and feels like your skin is burning - even if the water is lukewarm. Had you not just been outdoors, the temperature would have felt fine. Your nervous system adjusted to be more tolerable of the cold outdoors and when you washed your hands, that temperature difference felt extreme.
We need to keep examples like these in mind when it comes to our thoughts and beliefs around training with pain. In most cases training with some pain is totally fine.
A study done by Silbernagel et al. split individuals experiencing Achilles tendinopathy into two groups. One group was to perform loading and stretching exercises but was instructed to not perform any exercise that caused pain. The second group performed the same exercises but was instructed to allow up to a 5/10 pain with exercise, providing that it subsided by the next morning. At the end of the study, the group that allowed pain with exercise had fewer symptoms, experiencing less pain during walking, upon palpation, and reduced swelling.
Through a growing body of literature, it appears that exercising with pain is NOT inherently dangerous, and most participants experience equivalent or superior results compared to individuals practicing pain avoidance.
Pain is something that all of us have or will deal with in our lives. Instead of being fearful, we need to do our best to change our thoughts around pain and our relationship with it.
If you are worried about training with your pain or struggling with what and how much exercise to do, this is where working with a good coach or practitioner holds so much value.
At Thrive, this is what we do and we would love to help you or someone you love get back to training.
Till next time!
Coach Nate