For a lot of us, pushing through pain is something we’ve learnt to do.
Whether it’s working towards a PR in the gym, or maybe just being able to move around day to day, pushing through body discomfort has made you become a more resilient person.
But what happens when pushing through pain becomes less of an option? Maybe you are now experiencing:
- Not feeling as strong/fit, or as capable as before?
- Mentally tired or frustrated?
- Dealing with a new more serious injury, or a pain ‘flare up’?
The good news is that exercise is still here to help.
Exercise is one of the best things you can do for your pain. Whether it’s in a muscle, a joint or a nerve, we have many options and tools at our disposal when ‘just push through’ has been exhausted.
How? There are hundreds of ways that exercise can continue to help in situations like these, such as:
- reducing or modulating pain sensations
- managing inflammation
- increasing strength, range of motion etc.
But amongst those ways, there are 3 super important reasons
- It’s scalable to any situation – high intensity or low intensity.
- It’s autonomous – it puts you in the driver’s seat and gives you back control.
- It shifts your fitness goals forward at the same time.
So, how do you start?
The easiest way to begin is to break up exercising into 3 categories: incidental, non-specific and specific exercise.
Incidental exercise is our foundation in these situations. When things seem overwhelming and you are not sure where to begin, focus on the smaller and easier movements – this is a great starting point if you haven’t exercised in a while.
These can include:
- Daily steps: You would be surprised how much increasing steps can break certain pain cycles – a bit of twisting and turning movement does wonders for a lot of issues
- Movement variation: Moving around from sitting to standing, or sitting to lying down where possible, to help manage uncomfortable positions
Non-specific exercise is our next rock we can jump to. Focusing on things that either ‘feel nice’ to do or shift the focus away from the problem are great introductions into more intense exercise. This is great if you want to train hard, but need more of a ‘mental break’.
We start to get more of the pain modulating effects here; for example, increases in body temperature and endorphins help dull bad sensations, whilst we also get increases in ‘good exercise pains’ like muscle fatigue to act as distractions.
Some options here are:
- Focusing on training different body parts or movements
- Utilise different sports, or environments temporarily (like water, for example)
- Reducing specificity in training (ie. less barbell work)
Specific exercise is where coaching and allied health come in. This is where we can focus on the specific ‘movement limitations’ that are related to your pain experience. This may be a combination of muscle strengthening, muscle conditioning, increasing range of motion, or just mobilising certain body parts.
This is great for working through specific problems, or if you need progression from the previous options.
These often look like ‘weird exercises’ – you see someone with a ball between their legs, or standing with one leg with a foam roller against the wall. These are a temporary means to an end, and should progress in intensity and specificity towards what you want your body to be able to do.
Specific exercises can look like:
- Warmup or daily movement exercises
- Constraints or variations of more typical exercises to bias certain movement patterns
At the end of the day, injury and pain is an unfortunate part of life. Having a checklist of scalable ‘tools’ in your movement toolbox is one of the best ways we can handle these tougher periods of time. Even when things seem dire, take it one step at a time and work yourself closer to the light at the end of the tunnel.
