In reply to my recent post on pain, a reader asked, “I think you were talking more about metaphorical pain, but in regards to physical pain I’m curious what your thoughts are. If I play basketball and my feet hurt, as long as it’s within reason, the solution is to play more basketball. What do you think? Is the pain the solution?”
My response: It might not always be as simple as keep playing basketball—although it could be.
I look at physical pain as a signal. A signal that’s trying to show me something about either my body or the thing I exposed my body to.
When I would run, I would often get spasms in my neck/shoulder area. That was a signal that my neck/shoulders needed more stretching—both before the run and as an ongoing preventive measure.
If I would workout and it caused excessive soreness… it was a signal that the muscle was intensely challenged and needed more attention/reps to be built up.
If an exercise caused injury, however, then a deeper exploration was needed. Deadlift, for example, is an exercise I had to remove from my routine altogether. I would repeatedly throw out my back regardless of how clean my technique was. This was a signal that I just had an injury-prone lower back and deadlift wasn’t appropriate for me. So, I opted for bodyweight and light/moderate resistance exercises instead.
And so, yes, I would still say the cure for the pain is in the pain—not to say we keep doing the same things blindly—but because it’s only by exploring and interpreting the signal of the pain that we can determine the appropriate path forward.