I’ve come to think that you can somewhat reduce your chance of chronic injury (and improve chronic pain you already have) by learning to notice and pay close attention to pain right at the moments when it crops up.
By doing so, you can learn to immediately adjust how you move to take the pain into account (not avoiding the action, but changing the way you engage in the action). The goal is to make your movements as smooth and natural as possible. If avoiding the pain is causing you to make less natural movements, then you’re at risk of making the pain worse in the longer term (e.g., a knee injury can cause you to walk in an imbalanced way that leads to an injury in your other knee).
I used to ignore this kind of subtle pain, and I think doing so led to problems (e.g., I used to have chronic lower back pain, which, thankfully, I don’t have anymore).
There is, however, a mistake that is just as serious as ignoring subtle pain, which I’ve seen a number of times: not using your body at all because of pain. While some pain is an indicator that you need rest for a certain period of time (e.g., the pain of a serious knee injury right after it occurs), avoiding using a part of the body for too long will often start to cause other problems (body parts atrophy surprisingly quickly without use). In fact, movement and use of the body often seems to be critical to feeling better (and not atrophying) when you are dealing with chronic pain. So movement and usage of the body is important when you have chronic pain, as long as you can do that movement in a way that doesn’t make the injury worse. That means you have to be able to differentiate between discomfort that is fine to push through, and pain that indicates you’re making things worse.
Additionally, in my experience, a key skill for pain is to increase awareness of how you move and learn to notice subtle pains – not so you can avoid movement, but so that you can train yourself to move in a more natural, smooth, and comfortable way. If you have trouble knowing how to do this, a physiotherapist could help you.
Note: If you are experiencing new or chronic pain, please see a medical doctor. It’s important to rule out issues that may not heal properly without treatment. Additionally, if you have chronic pain, consider seeing a physiotherapist.
This piece was first written on August 7, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 4, 2023.
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