How to train around pain
At Gloucester Chiropractors, our role is to help you to continue doing whatever activity you enjoy doing.
Almost everyone who exercises will get aches, niggles, pains or injuries. For the context of this blog lets differentiate what we mean:
- When we say an ‘injury’, it is usually something involving a specific event or moment that causes more severe harm such as a pop, snap, giving or severe pain. Most people understand that getting these things checked by a medical professional is a good idea. This is because it could be more serious and can involve things such as tearing or rupturing something.
- An ache or niggle is something much milder. For this context it is often slow to come on, mild in terms of pain severity and often gets worse during exercise or activity, then recovers in 1 weeks’ time, just in time to exercise again. Sound familiar…then let’s discuss.
There are many causes of these aches or niggles, but some common ones are tendons or muscles. The reason they’re sore is often because once upon a time you likely did too much, too soon with that body part, and it never calmed down. Most people rarely remember how it specifically starts. To start with, that tissue can feel quite inflamed, and they often are, but as time goes on and we can’t use it as much as we’d want to or without pushing through pain, then that tissue can become degenerated as well.
Most people’s strategy for this is to train through that pain because they can. No pain, no gain as they say. They do this, get sore and wait a week for it to calm down, before they go again. Often this leads to doing less and less each week.
So what is the alternative?
Calm stuff down, build stuff up
Often a temporary reduction in load before building up again is useful. So, what is load, and what does that mean. Load in its simplest form is anything that, that body part must put up with. This could be manual work, lifting the kids, DIY or in the context that we’ll discuss today, the gym, or exercise in general.
Step one – calm it down
- Just for a week or two reduce your load. This means trying to remove any aggravating activities or anything that you know can flare it up. This doesn’t mean wrapping yourself in bubble wrap and lying in bed as we still want to keep that area moving and blood pumping but trying to let any inflammation or irritation settle gives us a great foundation to build.
Step 2 – modify your activities
- Remember load that we discussed before. Reduce this in one way or another. Whether that is taking more breaks at work, adjusting your work set up to ease the stress on your body or at the gym or when exercising changing one of these variables to comply to the golden rules that will follow:
- Weight, volume, frequency or intensity
- Range of motion – a box squat instead of a regular squat
- Tempo – faster movements are typically more provocative
- Isometrics – holding a position for a set period of time if a tolerable movement cannot be found
- Biomechanical variation – simply moving differently whether that be a change in the angle of a bench or a heel lift when squatting.
Golden rules. The adjustment in volume must mean you have:
- Less than 3/10 pain during exercise meaning a very mild amount of pain is okay for the final few reps
- And if there is any pain that it quickly settles post session and is not worse again 24h later
Step 3 – slowly build
- This means doing slightly more each time you go to load that area
- Every time you do slightly more you provide enough stimulus for your body to adapt but not enough to flare up and thus you don’t have to wait another week to use that area. With more frequent use and less irritation that area will become stronger, more tolerable to load and thus less painful.
So, to summarise. If you have an ‘injury’, that’s best to get checked out. If you have an ache or a niggle, try a few of these techniques. And if you’re struggling with anything from finding those aggravating factors to finding it hard to build things up, then come and see a chiropractor who can help further.
A final word. Don’t wait for an injury or a niggle. Get yourself checked before finding yourself in this situation.
