We have all heard the phrase no pain, no gain - but is it true? As with most things, the answer is not necessarily straight forward and will depend on your specific pain/discomfort, desired activity, and stage of tissue healing/recovery. In general, the first thing when considering whether you should push through pain is to determine if what you are feeling is a sign of an injury or muscle soreness. Muscle soreness because of pushing your body to get stronger is not a bad sign. If pain comes on during an activity, you may not necessarily need to stop immediately. If you can change your pain by modifying the activity (slow down, use less weight, etc), you can carry on. If there is no change with activity modification, there are “rules” to consider to aide in determining if you can continue your activity. In general, you can keep pushing through pain/soreness as long as it stays within a manageable range. This is pending there are no signs of serious injury that needs to be addressed prior to safely returning to activity.

Signs of an acute injury (STOP): severe pain, swelling, numbness/tingling, feeling of a joint giving out or locking up, symptoms that persist despite modification of activity, and tenderness along a bone. If you are experiencing any of these, it is best to get the injury checked out to determine severity and exercise/activity that can be done safely without causing further injury to the tissue.

General rules: There are a couple different ways to determine what is an acceptable amount of pain/discomfort when is comes to pushing through symptoms. We like to think of it in terms of attention.

If you know pain/discomfort is there, but you are able to keep it at the back of your mind, you can safely carry on.
If pain starts to come to the forefront of your mind making it hard to concentrate on a conversation, you need to modify at that point (slow down, change form, etc). If modification does not help at this point, stop the activity. It may be time to have the injury examined by a healthcare professional.
If you are a person more inclined to numbers, you can follow the scale below (0 = no pain, 10 = worst pain imaginable). (1)

When monitoring symptoms, there are three timeframes to monitor for overall progression/regression.

Immediate – how are symptoms during an activity and the first 1-2 hours following completion. Are you able to modify symptoms? Are you able to push through without making pain worse? Does it change throughout an activity (stay same, get better, get worse)? If you are able to work through without pain worsening or effecting performance/duration, carry on. Pay attention to how symptoms are after you stop. Over the 1-2 hours that follow, are symptoms improving, increasing, or decreasing?

Next few days – How does pain/symptoms respond over the next couple days following an activity. If pain is generally good during/after an activity, but increases over the next days, it is a sign that you likely did too much. Even though some symptoms are allowed during activity, symptoms should return to baseline by 24 hours after completion.

Medium/long-term – Overall, are symptoms improving, staying the same, or worsening. If symptoms are improving, you can likely stay on the same track you are on. If symptoms are staying the same or worsening, reconsider your currently plan overall.

As with anything, if you have any questions or concerns at all, please reach out for an assessment of your pain/injury. We are here to help keep you active as much as possible while minimizing risk for injury/aggravation.

No Pain, No Gain?!