Understanding Your Relationship With Pain
We all experience muscular and joint-associated pain; at varying intensities, for varying durations, and in different areas.
You may recall experiencing pain following:
A single, traumatic event (e.g. a fall onto hard surface)
Overuse (some like to call ‘misuse’) (e.g. too much weightlifting or other sport)
A common consensus is that these muscle and joint injuries/ pains occur because our activities have exceeded our total ‘load tolerance’.
Essentially:
Too much intensity
Too long in duration
Too much intensity and duration.
Here’s a few more examples:
As a side note - Considerations should be taken to regard the role of emotions, cognition, and physiological stress on the experience of pain.
It has been identified that there are 3 common responses to pain that in some form, we tend to lean toward.
They are:
Fear & avoidance (one end of spectrum)
Push through and ignore (other end of spectrum)
Temporary modification of activity followed by gradual efforts towards increasing resiliency (somewhere in the middle)
1. Fear and avoidance.
This response can be characterised as fear-driven avoidance of activities that a person suspects may worsen their pain.
A person may associate bodily sensations as “warnings” that they are doing damage and will avoid these sensations because of a fear of “breaking” themselves.
This response is useful when:
The body has experienced trauma. Temporary fear and avoidance of those activities allows us to heal and recover (physically and emotionally).
Post injury or painful flare up to allow symptoms to settle.
This response is not useful when:
It prevents us from addressing the issues, and leads to chronic underuse; resulting in loss of strength, coordination etc.
The avoidance and fear of potentially provocative stimuli impacting other areas of life. E.g. not being able to do your sport because you have not spent the time to build yourself back up due to fear of fragility.
2. Push Through and Ignore.
Characteristics of this response may be a held belief that “sensations are a sign of psychological and physical weakness”.
The person may ignore the sensations and punish themselves. They will usually train harder to “toughen themselves up”.
This response is useful when:
You’ve got a job to do that is more important than giving your body time to rest and recover. e.g. Winning a championship UFC fight, NBA playoffs, or when you’re moving house and need to lift boxes.
Your body is able to adapt quickly and overcome the short bout of pain.
This response is not useful when:
You exacerbate symptoms and are eventually forced to take time out because you’ve run your body into the ground. Now you can’t train for 6 months.
You exceed your body’s ability to recover in time before your next session, now you can’t train properly and the pain impacts your quality of training and other areas of your life.
3. Temporary modification of activity followed by gradual efforts towards increasing resiliency.
Characteristics of this approach include: an ability to step back and accurately asses which factors the pain is associated with, identifying which factors underpin the sensations.
The person will adjust their programme to maintain a tolerable level whilst addressing underpinning factors.
This approach is useful because:
You reap the benefits of both approaches.
You know when to let symptoms settle, to rest and recover.
You know when to reintroduce activity.
You have given your body time to recover and now you can adopt a sensible approach to rebuild yourself.
There is focus on addressing the problems whilst respecting the body and mind’s needs.
We all likely sit somewhere on this spectrum.
In my experience, where we sit on that spectrum is not entirely fixed. I think of our response to pain like a slider on a DJ deck.
It is limited to some degree but we can learn to slide up and down, depending on what we need at the time. We can learn to have a healthier response to pain.
Photo by: Karolina Grabowska
It may be useful to learn how to persevere at times and, at other times, to know when to take it easy.
As a side note: Some may say that a person’s responses are closely linked to personality traits like neuroticism, and openness and are therefore very difficult to change.
To quote Greg Lehman.
Sometimes, we’ve just gotta…
“Calm shit down”
“Build shit back up”
Here are some practical tips to help you develop a more balanced relationship with pain:
Increase your vocabulary to describe different bodily sensations. E.g. a bit irritating, short and sharp pain, dull ache, ‘workout sore’.
Measure and track your workout and activity, this will help you identify anomalies of activity that may have been a bit too much. E.g. 3 hours of gardening in one bout, now your back feels irritating and achy.
Measure recovery times, how long does it take you to recover from an episode of pain.
Pay attention to activities that make it feel better, these can be clues. You don’t NEED to understand why they help, just that they do. You can always dig to learn more later.
Note your response to the pain along this spectrum. Ask yourself if you could do with moving that ‘response slider’ up or down a bit.
A healthier relationship with pain can take time to develop, but the more you learn to work with your body and emotions, the more you can help to regulate it when it accumulates. You can then tailor your training towards building resiliency.
Remember to ask yourself: How am I responding to this pain and where am I currently sitting on this spectrum?
Then: Consciously weigh up whether you could do with sliding your response further up or down the spectrum to optimise recovery and to build resiliency.
As always, I’m only ever an email away. Fill in the form below and we can chat.
Keep moving,
Monty