Feelings During Exercise Part One: Pain
Feelings During Exercise is a Multi-Part Guide On The Voices In Your Head During Training.
Good Afternoon!
Today starts a series of newsletters that will attempt to guide you through some of your biggest limitations to change-making exercise: your thoughts and feelings.
I lament that my field of work has a LOT of ground to cover in terms of making people feel confident exercising on their own.
In many corners of the personal training realm, coaches and therapists do an eerily good job of striking fear into the average exerciser and creating a codependency on their instruction for the sake of generating consistent business.
“You can’t perform this lift without my supervision.”
“Running is bad for your knees.”
“That lift won’t help you, you’re not an influencer.”
These narrative-controlling phrases are just a few of many that some insecure healthcare professionals use to keep clientele close instead of encouraging them to explore all avenues of fitness.
The goal for any health-based service work should be to aim for client autonomy.
Trainers, read that again.
When these insensitive forms of fear mongering are planted in non-fitness people’s heads, they become dogma.
This brings me to the first of our fitness feelings: Pain.
Feelings During Exercise: Pain
In my seven years of resistance training and client coaching experience, I’ve worked with hundreds of different types of people. But the very first people I saw as a young trainer at a commercial gym with very little knowledge were people who were recovering from very traumatic injuries.
This was a gift and a curse as a new trainer – I developed an immense understanding of the human body by learning how it recovers from trauma while simultaneously juggling someone’s livelihood as I helped them recover and regain their old strength.
I didn’t take this responsibility lightly.
The more broken bodies I helped people fix, the more I begin to realize (and even hear from my clients themselves): Pain really is weakness, leaving the body.
I hate that I just had to invoke a quote from the US Marine Corps, but now, it’s true, and I believe it.
Luckily, I’d met people on the other end of some very supportive physical therapy journeys.
Early in my career, most of them hadn’t hadn’t been trained to think in absolutes about exercise.
The unfortunate truth is that so many fitpros specialize in training the mind and body to avoid things rather than explore them, and won’t take the time to learn the verbiage that creates fearlessness and open-mindedness in their clients.
When I discovered this, I discovered that while pain is undoubtedly a real thing in everyone’s body, it is subjective, and can sometimes only be as bad as the client (or practitioner) makes it out to be.
This isn’t to say people’s pain isn’t real.
It certainly is.
But I’ve developed a framework of language over the years to help people reimagine pain’s role in the overall body ecosystem, and I want to share it with you today.
Is Pain Limiting Your Progress?
When I’ve helped people recover from fractured bones or from torn muscles, the thing I’m very used to hearing seeing someone fully regain strength is, “I didn’t know I was that strong!”
And they probably didn’t!
My theory for this is that pain has affected them so much on the neurological level that, whether they know it, or not, their brain is telling their body they can’t do something, and without trying it they’ll never believe they can.
Speaking from experience, this is happened to me too, when trying to train my way to recovery, or even train through an injury.
But pain, like a lot of other things in health and fitness, isn’t necessarily indicative of some sort of malfunction, or even a misstep.
This is the first of two ways I tell my clients to look at pain — a signal from the brain not to stop all together, but be cautious and mindful in their approaches to movement.
The brain craves movement. But it uses pain to tell you the best strategies for it when you’re rushing your process.
Some light pain in the low back on a deadlift, for example, might be indicative of a weak core or just generally underused low back musculature.
If we looked at it this way, as opposed to “deadlifting hurts, and I’m never going to do it again,” how dramatically would our relationship with exercise change?
This is not to say that pain is something to disregard altogether. Shooting, stinging and sudden pain are all things that should be taken care of.
But, in many cases, sometimes the fear of pain — in both previously injured people, or people who’ve never been injured at all — can be irrational and steering you away from progress in your health.
This brings me to the second way of reframing pain: Avoiding dramatization of pain.
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