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Whether it is pain in our muscles, tendons or other structures one thing is certain, pain decreases our quality of life and our ability to perform. Adrenaline can shut down most of our pain signaling but even the fear of possible pain can have such a drastic effect on your psychology that power and force output are inhibited through our psychology.
Opioids -or more commonly called “pain killers”- are effective to very strong at providing pain relief (analgesic effect) and work through various pathways but most also induce drowsiness and/or make you sleepy (sedative) among other things that you don’t want when you are in a performance or training setting. The more effective they are in the short term, the longer the list of possible side effects is. Luckily they are mostly a last resort in clinical settings. And we didn’t even mention most products being banned for competitive athletes without a doctor’s subscription.
They sure are but in this blogpost I want to convey why pain can be used as a helpful indicator. Playing a game, competing or exercising through pain or, even more dangerous, using a local sedative or anti-inflammatory drug to perform without the inhibitions caused by the pain might make incurring a new injury or re-injuring yourself more likely and can enhance an existing problem to one of your structures. Masking the pain doesn’t resolve the underlying problem, it just temporarily removes the breaks put in place by your nervous system.
From peer reviewed research we can learn that pain is not very indicative of structural damage. We have many imaging techniques to detect scar tissue, tears, fractures and so on: x-ray, echography, CT-scans and MRI technology can help us visualise the situation inside the body vastly more accurately than what a conversation or the naked eye ever could. I write this because it is getting confirmed over and over that some people without pain have structural damage and a lot of people without detectable structural damage do experience pain. So what is pain then?
Researchers in this specific field have come up with the term “nociception”. It encompasses the detection of painful stimuli. Parts of the nervous system project into skin and soft tissue to detect extremes of heat, cold, mechanical, and chemical signals and alert the body of potential dangers. This is different from pain in that pain is a subjective experience influenced by many factors.
There are many types of pain but to keep it short, this post won’t go into depth on mechanistic research consensus. Interestingly, nociception and pain can happen simultaneously or one can occur without the other.
These two clarifications set the stage to go over what else we have discovered through the decades. I hope that the following list of factors influencing the pain experience help you decouple what you feel from your identity and even help you manage or train out of the pain over time.
Social conflict, poor sleep, mood, inflammation levels, anxiety, blood flow and beliefs and general activity levels are all mediators in the human pain experience. Certain things are in our control and others take hard work and consistency to straighten out over longer periods.
Given that pain can show up as a false signal and as a warning I believe that it is better to air on the side of safety and just identify it as a signal from our brain that it perceives to be in danger in some sense. When you experience more than a 3 on a pain scale of 1 to 10, check yourself. What has my sleep quality and quantity been like lately, what is my mood currently, have I been eating nutritious, hydrating and overall anti-inflammatory meals? Has anything significant changed in my social life or at work/school?
When you rule out the lifestyle and psychological factors or have acknowledged the controllable ones, I recommend doing the following things:
1. Ask yourself, have my training volume/load and intensity been changed drastically (more than 10% for example) on a weekly basis? If so, try to smoothen out the increases to address to help prevent things from worsening.
2. Address blood flow with targeted exercise selection. If it is a joint that is hurting, know that you can stimulate collagen synthesis every 6 hours with 1 to 6 minutes of loading or movement.
3. Pain could be a signal from your brain that tensions are not balanced around an area so you could train opposing muscle groups directly and muscles that contribute to stabilizing the joint or movement pattern. The tension imbalance might fade after a very limited amount of stimulation or after building up the strength, try to stay patient.
4. The brain might just be erroneously sending danger warnings but you still need to shut it up by gradually exposing it to higher and higher forces in the parts of the range of motion that triggers the signal. It is very important to start so light that the pain is 3/10 or lower and not only build a strength reserve in that part of the range but also at shorter and longer muscle lengths. By doing this you repeatedly remind the brain that it actually wasn’t as dangerous after all to recruit the fibres to that extent in those positions. The mantra deload-reload-overload is generally good advice but people sabotage themselves often by implementing one or multiple steps badly.
5. Once you are no longer in pain, you should aim to make the area stronger and to have more work capacity than the last time around when the pain first showed up.
6. Recognise that something will happen eventually. What happens to you doesn’t define who you are, but how you handle and carry yourself afterwards can!
An important caveat is that ego and a lack of time to gradually build up is what is often the cause of risky load management but adults should take accountability for their choices. If you didn’t have the time to start preparing earlier, if you wanted to go for the big jump in weight on the bar for the sake of fun, that’s your choice and there’s always a trade off between risk and reward. On the other hand, we don’t always know what we are capable of and exploring our limits is what sports can be about. The circumstances can have a drastic (up to 5%) influence on performance.
Our brain is always trying to keep us alive. When it perceives certain outputs as dangerous, it will inhibit anything past that point. When the brain detects a lack of stability, neural drive to the muscles will be cut short. When our mental levels of arousal or even body temperature is too low or too high, peak performance or your most effective training stimulus won’t happen. And this is all a good thing. Imagine how much more prevalent injuries would be if the brain let you tap into 100% of your abilities at any time?
Whether you actually have structural damage or not according to scans and doctors, you still need to address the pain experience. I hope you learned by reading this, that there’s more to it than anatomy and movements.
Your pain experience can remind you to get you to take better care of your mental health and lifestyle choices and even help you adjust your programming before you really hurt yourself. It can be a guiding light to address the biggest inhibiting factor to your performance level. You might just unlock untapped potential.
If you want the brain to unlock 100%, let’s work together on your mobility, stability, strength and structural integrity as well as familiarity with similar outputs.
I started my coaching service because I love this puzzle. Get in touch to solve yours.
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