Why are you experiencing pain when you exercise? The first step is determining the different in hurt and harm when it comes to the pain you’re feeling.
Summary:
Pain after exercise is not always a bad thing. It depends on the type of pain you’re experiencing.
Reconditioning pain is the pain you feel when you start a new exercise. It goes away in 2-3 days.
Harmful pain gets worse and worse each time you exercise. A professional can help you find the right exercises and make sure you’re using the right muscles.
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Transcript: Pain from exercise, is it harmful?
Dr. Heather Tick: Many patients tell me that they hurt when they exercise. Some people find that when they have painful conditions that they actually hurt when they do take a time to exercise.
So there’s a few things that you need to know about pain after exercise. First is the difference between hurt and harm. If you were exercising for the first time or you’re increasing your exercise gradually and doing more and new things, you ordinarily get some pain. That’s called Reconditioning Pain. It will go away after 2 or 3 days and the next time you do that same amount of exercise, it won’t hurt so much or it won’t last so long and that’s how you know that that is the hurt type of pain, not the type of pain that’s going to harm you.
So the harm kind of pain will get worse and worse each time you exercise and will lasts longer and longer then you have to go back to the drawing board and whether you’re doing it with yourself working with a professional or physical therapist or a trainer. You have to talk to them about why this isn’t working for you. Sometimes it’s not using the right muscle to do the activity.
So sometimes we think that just because we want to reach our arm forward and we are reaching our arm forward that our brain knows how to do it with the right set of muscles. Now, when we came with our factory settings, the way we were born and the way we develop early in life that is true. When you move your arm forward, when you reach forward you’re going to use automatically the right set of muscles and you don’t have to think about it. But after you’ve been through a series of injuries or you’ve been in chronic pain, those factory settings get changed and that requires more expertise and so at that point you need to find an expert whose going to be able to help you figure out how you can exercise without harm.
