Rowers, Here's What You Need To Know About Pain!

Let’s talk about pain!

Because pain is a very important thing that we have in our bodies. Yes, it hurts, it can be uncomfortable and pain can manifest in so many different ways. Things can be hot, things can be too cold. You can have sharp pain, dull pain, achy pain, the throbbing pain. There are so many different ways that we all experience pain and subjectively from person to person we all experience it a little bit differently.

Pain can be something that just feels like a nagging thing. Pain can be something that's very sharp and actually causes us to stop what we're doing. Pain can make it so it feels like our joints buckle. Pain has this immense power and what feels like this immense authority to actually change the way we move and act. Sometimes that pain that we feel like when it happens that there's damage happening.

But I want to let you in on a little secret, and that is that pain is not the active injury happening. Pain is actually a signal. It's a signal that is a link between our brain and all the nerves that are woven in or around throughout our body that are in constant communication, basically telling our brain, both our subconscious self and our conscious self what's going on, what's the state of us at the moment. Then based on our experience with that pain, like say you know you've had an ankle sprain before in the past, you've had some low back pain in the past. You've gotten a paper cut in the past. You've had different ways to experience pain and discomfort and based on that history with it, you have knowledge that you are working off of, that your body is working off of to tell you is this something we need to be worried about and if so, maybe that'll cause a spasm. Or maybe you'll just be able to say it's nothing if I keep going it'll feel better.

Okay, so the key, anytime we're experiencing pain, is to be listening to that pain, to be understanding the pain, okay, and to not necessarily look at it with fear, but to look at it as another piece of information that we're using in the grand scheme of our physical rehabilitation process on how we're going to feel better in the long term.

It's always good when thinking of that and acknowledging that to also remember that pain can sometimes be a signal that good things are happening. Let's say, for example, you're out in the cold, a very cold day. Maybe you've been throwing some snowballs, or maybe it's one of those cold, sundays and you're washing the car for the week and the fingers freeze. As they slowly warm up and come back to life, it hurts right? Well, what's happening there is not damage happening, that is healing happening. Sometimes, if we reframe things subtly that allows us to put that pain in perspective, so that way, we can succeed in utilizing it as just another tool of information in the long run, to help us feel better, to help us move better, to help us perform better and to help us achieve all the goals that we want.