NO PAIN, NO GAIN?

Current Definition of Pain according to International Association for the Study of Pain:

🔎 ‘An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.’

‼Pain is an efficient protective mechanism when something is not right, so it is worth to listen to it, it is there for a reason. Pain science is vast and complicated field and today’s post is just about musculoskeletal pain.

🔴 If you feel your muscles after exercising it’s good, if you feel your joints after exercising it’s not so good. Done too much, too fast, too heavy, too intense etc.
🟡 And I pretty much dislike this ‘no pain, no gain’ slogan because people do misunderstand it and hurt themselves by thinking that pushing harder through pain is good for them.
🟢 I say that the only acceptable pain is muscles ‘burning’ during an exercise but no sharp, shooting, irradiating, dull pain is acceptable to push through willingly. If a muscle is injured, it will hurt too, and that sensation is different from the sensation of ‘burning’.

➡️ Sometimes, some pain is acceptable during rehab but then it is discussed with the specialist how much is ok. Sometimes first few moves maybe be niggly but then it eases and it’s ok to carry on (we’re not talking about pain lasting the first 30minutes or so).

💡In case of pain during / after exercising rethink your load, training intensity & recovery.

👩‍⚕️It is worth seeing a specialist to discuss chronic / ongoing /persistent pain, because if it’s been there for a while, it may not go away on its own. That is that kind of pain people put up with more frequently.