Why You Should Stop Chasing Pain.
Opinion
Ever had an injury?
Daft question, I know…
What’s the first thing that goes through your mind when you get one, apart from ouch that hurts!
You want to get it fixed right?
And preferably quickly because you’ve got a race to go run or you also rather not have pain and discomfort.
True?
Sure, I’ve felt the same way myself.
You might of employed a ‘give it a rest’ strategy and hope it heals or maybe you were proactive and went to see a physio who did some soft tissue work because it’s what you think you need then maybe they gave you some thera-band exercises too.
So you diligently do your ‘fix it’ exercises the problem goes away at least temporarily only for it to return, perhaps worse!
Damn it!
More physio, more isolation motor control exercises…
You got sucked into an endless cycle of rehab purgatory, didn’t you?
It’s alright I’ve been down that path many times too and as someone who specialises in sports rehab actually become very good at having clients perform motor control type exercises.
I was as diligent in getting them to perform endless repetitions perfectly as they were in doing them.
We had some success but of course the damn niggle would keep raising it’s ugly head.
Then I had an epiphany!
What if I stopped looking at fixing and correcting instead look at lifestyle, behaviours, being positive, improving resilience and teaching motor learning not motor control?
Rather than endlessly repeating the same exercise and pattern, instead create an environment where the stress is never the same. Do this through variety and variation, move away from teaching form for optimising performance.
I realised this erroneous process was making my clients ‘over-protective’ making them conscious movers and thereby making them afraid to fail.
How totally ridiculous!
Repetitive patterns don’t build resilience, variability and sustainability of patterns do, it causes adaptation. It’s better to figure out what level of stress you can handle to execute a movement well.
Know where you are starting and what’s the end goal. For example, if you’re a runner, I’m guessing you might be!
The end goal is not how well and how long you can hold a plank for.
It’s to make you a more efficient runner with better more stable springs. So we need to develop a variety of skill based movement that helps us become more efficient, springier runners.
Key point; ‘remember the end goal’
And here’s something else to understand too.
You need to trust yourself. Just because you feel pain doesn’t mean you are causing harm.
Realise it’s okay to cause a little bit of pain because you realise the next day you didn’t make it worse.
Now you can begin to move with confidence, now you know you’re not a fragilista!
Your body is very well equipped to adapt. It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the load you were not prepared for.
This is why only doing motor control exercises won’t solve the problem in the long run. You might need to start with them. And that’s okay. Not saying you don’t need them.
Pain is multi-factorial
Here’s an example
I was working with a client recently, who as it happened had developed pain in his lateral hip.
We worked through some tests to screen quality of movement and challenged him through a variety of movement patterns to disrupt his nervous system from the over-protective pattern whilst never pursuing a fix it mindset, we could always decrease sensitivity and produce better quality of movement.
However, whilst running had improved he was having lets say good days and worse days.
So I started to look at what other factors might be influencing the issue.
Interestingly he’d forgotten he had been having some trouble sleeping the previous 2 weeks then managed to string together a few days of good quality sleep and guess what?
Yep! no more pain.
So as you see pain is multi-factorial. A reason to stop chasing it!
But you gotta look at the big picture. What’s the end goal?
In sport no two movements will ever be the same. This is why perfect form is irrelevant, ‘performance in the wild does not look like a repetitive pattern’.
One of the key lessons I try to impart on people is to become more ’self-aware’ when they move. I’ll use different ways to achieve this sometimes something as simple as just asking them to estimate their errors.
I’ll wrap this up with an analogy I heard recently.
If you don’t move, you rust (like the ’Tin Man’) you become afraid to move and afraid of pain.
Don’t be a Tin Man, be an agile athlete. Movement is Medicine.
Here Are A Few Things Worth Knowing This Week
Movement
To my point above.
Ideally you want to seek ‘effortless’ movement learning. I often say to people, in running there should be no superfluous muscle work, running should feel effortless, not an effort, mechanically speaking. Of course there is metabolic demand, depending on the type of session being conducted.
Here’s a study looking into what happens in different environments when athletes are given an internal cue (focus on the knee’s in a squat) to an external cue (push the floor away).
Interestingly in every situation the athletes using the external cue performed the task with much less energy expenditure physically and mentally.
It’s a bit of a long read, so to make it useful perhaps look at the first page for a primer then bottom of pg81 and top half of pg 82, don’t worry the first page starts at 76!
So the next time you are performing a movement, like running try to give yourself an external cue, one of my favourites with running is land softly and lightly, give it a go.
Mindset
Making a change, whatever it is, is never easy.
Ever flipped a coin to try to help make a decision? Yeah me too!
Decisions, we make them every day. And with every decision we make (good or bad), our lives are defined just a little more, because decisions ultimately shape our destiny.
Here’s an interesting article about how it might just work based on a study conducted.
Looks like there were some limitations but it seems making a decision to change something it better than doing nothing.
The article goes onto to say "Maybe you weigh the pros and cons. Maybe you go with your gut. Or maybe, if you're like most people, you simply do nothing. After all, we have a cognitive bias that tends to make us prefer the status quo and focus more on the potential losses involved with change rather than the potential benefits."
Perhaps coin flipping is not the best way to make a change. Maybe our decisions are based on our values and those values are based on the standards to which we hold ourselves?
If you’re determined to succeed and have a hunger for better perhaps that’s a better driver for making good decisions?
Nutrition
Are you getting enough Vitamin D?
It’s important, don’t leave it until it’s too late or you’re too old.
Bones aren’t the only organs that respond to vitamin D, muscles do too. However, as we age, our muscles lose vitamin D receptors, perhaps helping to explain the loss in muscle strength as we age.
Indeed vitamin D status does appear to predict the decline in physical performance as we get older with lower vitamin D levels linked to poorer performance.
Recovery
Have you tried cold exposure as part of your recovery routine, either post work out or as part of your regenerative ritual?
No?
Well, you should do. I’ve been encouraging clients to try it for years (I’m still encouraging them!), I take a cold shower daily. There’s huge benefits to be had.
Here’s an article I found from a couple years back that might challenge you to give it a go!
Part of the reason humans have become weaker is because we’ve insulated ourselves with technology from experiencing variety in our daily lives. Make yourself a little uncomfortable and you might just reap the benefits and discover it isn’t nearly as bad as you imagined it might be.
Culture
Okay so there’s no races for you to enter maybe you need some motivation to keep you going in the mean time.
I found this short film called El Inglés, film maker James Slater tells the story of his father, Englishman David Slater, who, in 1981, ran up a mountain in the small Basque town of Elgoibar on a bet. He broke the record for the 6K road climb and became a legend in the amongst Elgoibar’s residents.
Slater’s record stood the test of time and now, years later, the hill climb is an annual event. This film made me think back to a book I read recently by Richard Askwith called Feet in the Clouds, (not an affiliate link) and the exploits of some seriously hard core fell runners. Definitely worth a read if you haven’t already.
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