Pain is an evolutionary response that evolved to get you out of physical harm. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work all too well.
Sometimes it starts screaming at us when there’s no real physical harm.
Other times, it slacks off and doesn’t tell us about physical harm until some massive damage has been done.
That’s why you hear stories where over-eager young males get psyched up and go balls-to-walls to walls on an exercise like the Bench Press. High on Adrenaline, they hit a new Personal Best and celebrate, only to wake up the next to excruciating shoulder pain.
Hence, it’s important to recognise when pain is reliable, and when it isn’t.
Unfortunately, this is hard, mainly because there are so many sources of pain, and each person has their own threshold of pain.
There is no panacea, but there are things that you can watch out for.
The Pain of Exercise
Muscle fatigue, the burn, spewing after a 20 rep widowmaker squat set, that’s all fine and good. Feel free to suck it up and carry on.
Acute Pain
In general, any sort of joint pain spells bad news, especially in the weights room.
This can manifest itself it not-so-straightforward ways; a click here, some tightness there, etc. In general, listen to your body a day or two after any training session and feel the types of pain that you’re experiencing. Muscle soreness and tightness is fine, but most anything else should be a hint that you did something excessive or wrong the previous day.
That should be a cue to look back at the previous training session, reflect and re-assess.
Other than that, I have a simple rule: No jerky motions. Everything under control.
Any form of sudden or unknown pain is definitely bad. If I’m experiencing a form of pain I’ve never experienced before, whether it be in the weights room or in everyday life, the first thing is to STOP.
When I’ve calmed down and the pain has subsided (a little), I then ask what the pain was and where it came from, researching if necessary.
Chronic Pain
Next up is chronic pain. The first thing to do here is to find out it’s source.
As an example, for a time, I was experiencing left knee pain during cycling. Ibuprofen, rest and soft-tissue massage around the area alleviated the symptoms, but it never solved the underlying problem; every time I rode my bike, I got knee pain.
So I tried to diagnose the issue. I read up on the common sources of knee pain. I then ran down a list of potential issues to see if any of them fit my problem.
I finally figured out (by watching my strokes and trying to feel for the problem) that I was using too high of a gear when cycling, and more importantly, had a lateral knee shift during the downstroke of my pedalling. ie: my left knee would move inwards instead of straight down when I pushed on the pedal.
The easy fix was to learn to use the full spectrum of gears. The hard fix was trying to teach my left leg to push straight down again.
Without going into too much details, my sports involvement in High School (shotput) made my left leg somewhat of the foreigner to my brain.
I had to actively teach the VMO (the teardrop-shaped muscle above the knee) to fire during the downstroke. I had to do without the aid of palpation, and because of that, had to be patient. It took me 6 months to truly fix the problem.
This was an example of when NOT to suck up the pain and instead use it as the basis for further questioning. This willingness to keep on questioning and thinking is absolutely essential.
The other case, was with my disk herniation. In that case, the pain was a result of the disk pressing against some nearby nerves. I wasn’t in real danger, and from what I’d read, I knew this issue would fix itself. But damn was it annoying!
No real fix here. Try to avoid postures which aggravated the pain (for me, sitting), and suck it up when avoidance wasn’t possible.
Final Words
Not all pain is equal. Find out the true face of your pain, and deal with it appropriately.
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