Given all of the talk about gym goers not giving their workouts enough intensity, when is pain a sign that you should stop what you are doing in the gym?

NEGI RK Friday, December 11, 2020

Given all of the talk about gym goers not giving their workouts enough intensity, when is pain a sign that you should stop what you are doing in the gym?

I write some posts with a more hardcore mindset and viewpoint than most, so this answer might surprise you.

Pain is always a sign that you should stop exercising, immediately.

Pain is never a good thing.

Discomfort, on the other hand, is something you can and should push through.

Discomfort can be good.

Learn to differentiate between PAIN and DISCOMFORT.

When warming up and cooling down, listen to your “pain teacher”. If something hurts, there is a reason for it. ALWAYS. Pain doesn’t happen for no reason.

The entire reason pain exists is to give you feedback that you are causing damage to yourself!

If I am warming up for squats and my knee hurts, I’m very much alert and on top of it.

Err…it’s my knee, so I LITERALLY am on top of it, but you know what I mean.

I’m monitoring it. Feeling it out.Most injuries are not acute (sudden) but chronic. They happen slowly over time.

Pain is sharp, acute, and localized-if your shoulder joint hurts, that is tissue damage and reactive inflammation. In other words, it’s a problem. Taking anti-inflammatory medication to reduce the swelling can help, but that is treating the symptom, not the cause. Furthermore, the inflammation is part of the healing process, so taking medication to reduce the pain is only smart when the inflammation is excessive.

Pain=Problem.

Avoid pain whenever possible. In the knee or shoulder joint examples above, I avoid exercises that cause pain, at least while the minor issues is happening. This alone has kept me quite healthy through the brutal training over the past 5 years.

Discomfort is the last few reps of a set of twenty squats or the last hundred meters of a four-hundred-meter race-it hurts, but not in a specific joint. It sort of just feels bad…everywhere. That’s lactic acid and hydrogen ions building up in the muscle and in your bloodstream.

Or an 800m race. Both are really tough. Not painful, but supremely uncomfortable.

From an evolutionary perspective, discomfort exists to keep us from wasting energy-it’s why you’ll never see people sprinting to work. It’s inefficient compared to walking so the body would rather just…have us walk. It would rather have us burn fat by ambling around than carbs by sprinting, for the simple reason that you can store infinite amounts of fat, and only a few hundred grams of carbs.

However, in the modern world, either form of energy isn’t usually in short supply, and these hard efforts are very useful for building muscle and burning fat…so suck it up and keep pushing. Lactic acid never killed anyone.

Actually, I just googled that, and there is a condition called Lactic acidosis. So, you can die from lactic acid, but it only happens to those with severe infections, sepsis or advanced liver disease.

So, discomfort=drive determinedly forward!

The entire reason why pain exists is to prevent us from doing stupid shit that could cause injury and jeopardize us getting laid and passing on our genes. No one wants to put that at risk, so listen to your body.

Pain and discomfort are easily confused, because they both hurt. They are both negative feeling. They both can happen during the same situations.

Here’s a handy-dandy professional-looking chart that I totally didn’t make in Word.

Once you can tell the two apart, training becomes less enjoyable, because you realize that you need to push yourself, but it also becomes safer and much more effective.