Everybody hurts, sometimes.

This is Part 1 of a series of posts I’ll be making with the aim of providing practical guidance on how to maintain training progress while dealing with pain or injuries.

For now, I would like to establish a very basic understanding of pain. Future posts will go further and discuss topics such as perception, habits, and load management.

Regardless of an individual’s preferred discipline(Bodybuilding, Powerlifting, CrossFit, etc.), occasional aches and pains will occur. This can be a result of training stress, or lots of other factors such as prolonged sedentary behaviour, old injuries not healing properly, and even poor mental health. In certain cases, people can also experience pain without any discernible cause. A drastic example of this would be Phantom Pain, when people still feel pain in parts of the body that have been removed.

We can also make a comparison between pain and a car alarm. While the purpose of a car alarm is to alert you and deter threats, certain alarms will go off even when there is no threat. As an example, someone simply leaning against your car could trigger the alarm. So your car alarm going off may not always mean there is a threat, but it behoves you to investigate and assess the situation. Cars with sensitive alarms send out more false alarms and similarly, people with more sensitive nervous systems(potentially due to previous injuries, or fear) can experience pain more often as well.

To conclude, pain is part of the human experience. While we should always make an effort to understand why something hurts, pain(or the fear of it) should not be something that impedes us from engaging in physical activity or even performing basic, everyday tasks.

In the presence of pain, the answer is not to shut down completely, but to do what we can and gradually rebuild mental and physical tolerance.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. The content of this post is based on my personal research, non-training related chronic pain, and sorting out the occasional aches and pains my lifters experience. If you are dealing with pain or injury, I would recommend consulting a medical professional with expertise in this area.