Should You Exercise Through Chronic Pain?
“Should I stop exercising if the pain gets worse?”
“How do I know when to push through pain when I exercise?”
“I try to exercise but I always end up flaring up my pain so I just stop.”
These are questions and comments that I get a LOT in the clinic so I thought…why not tackle them on the blog!
If you’d prefer to learn about this topic by listening to a longer audio version you can listen to this episode of my podcast titled Should You Exercise Through Pain When You Have Chronic Pain. You can find the episode HERE.
It can be really difficult to know how to exercise when you have chronic pain. If exercise causes pain to increase, this may cause some fear that you are damaging your body’s tissues. What we know about chronic pain is that the pain response is overprotective. This means that pain that occurs when you exercise is going to happen MUCH SOONER than you would damage any tissues.
For a very long time it was recommended to rest when you have pain. Over time we have learned that it’s even more productive to continue to stay moving when you have pain, especially in the case of chronic pain. Exercise can not only help with pain in the short term, but it can also help with general physical and mental health.
An article written in 2017 titled “Should Exercise be Painful in the Management of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain? A Systemic Review and Meta Analysis” answered the question-should you exercise through pain when you have chronic pain. The result?
Protocols using painful exercises offer a small but significant benefit over pain-free exercises in the short term. This means that people that did exercises through pain reported decreases in pain for short periods of time. This article shows us that we don’t need to be fearful to push into pain when exercising! This can help people breathe a sigh of relief if they have fear around exercising into pain.
Now you may still be thinking…but what if my pain increases later? Or, how do I know how much to push through the pain? Here are some general recommendations I tell people if they are exercising with chronic pain.
- Use a stop light system. A green light means the exercise feels good and doesn’t increase pain. Carry on. A yellow light means there is some pain when exercising, but the pain is not unbearable pain. Carry on. A red light means that the pain is sharp and unbearable. This is a sign that your nervous system is not liking what you are doing and is in hyper-protection mode. In this case it is most likely not going to be beneficial to continue to push through the pain.
- Think about the rest of your day. Do you have a lot of other tasks to do today? Do you know there’s stressful things coming up? Sometimes the pain system can become hyper-protective when it knows a threat is coming, even if the threat isn’t physical. Keep this in mind while you exercise and perhaps do something a little more gentle, especially if pain starts to increase a lot.
- Remind yourself you are safe. If pain occurs, remind yourself that this is your body trying to protect you. You aren’t damaging anything. The pain will reduce eventually. You have tools in your toolkit you can fall back on if you need. Reminding yourself of these things can help the nervous system to feel safe, even if pain occurs.
Was this helpful for you? Let me know if this blog has helped to change your view around exercising through pain! If you’re looking for some movement practices to get started, visit my trauma informed YouTube channel HERE.