Fitness Journal - Pain Management

by Heather Long | More from this Blogger

26 Jul 2007 09:47 PM

Part of the goal of this fitness journal is to explore the ways you can document your own fitness. Sometimes we focus just on the workout, other times we focus on what motivated us and today, we're going to focus on the obstacles in our path to getting where we want to be.

Pain Management

When we refer to pain management in fitness, we're talking about our measured response to pain stimulus. I don't mean we're interested in causing injury to ourselves. In fact, in fitness pain is a necessary component that warns us if we've gone too far or done too much.

I've discussed over training in my blog before and the damage that can inflict on your body. One of the ways that pain helps us to avoid over training is that we listen to our body. After a workout, you should be pleasantly tired. You should have moderate to light soreness. For example, spend thirty minutes riding anywhere on your bike and then come home, shower and sit down at the desk to work. When you get up for your first break, you should feel tightness and some discomfort in your legs.

This is normal and it's a reflection of the stress to the muscles and their attempts to tighten up and repair. All good things in the world of regular exercise provided you warmed up adequately enough and stretched well when you cooled down.

Now perform the same workout or routine daily and skip the warm up and cool down, chances are you'll find yourself developing powerful and very painful leg cramps. Your legs will hurt and not just be sore. Your lower back will hurt and even your glutes and hips will complain. You may even cause an injury that sets you back from your workout.

Pain management is something we do to control the pain and promote the workout instead of feel the pain and mess up the workout. There's an old saying that no pain, no gain. They don't mean you should be in agony, they do mean you should have some discomfort and that it should be challenging.

Learn more about Heather Long

Heather Long is 35 years old and currently lives in Wylie, Texas. She has been a freelance writer for six years. Her husband and she met while working together at America Online over ten years ago.

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