Acme products probably won't help...

Often when something hurts, our inclination is to avoid doing it.  This is eminently sensible and usually the right thing to do.

Every once in a while, though, we have to look a little more closely at what we mean by “hurts.”  The kind of pain we experience when we have a Wile E. Coyote kind of experience with a piano or cliff or both is definitely something to steer clear of.  Copious amounts of blood or body parts disconnecting are also useful indicators that something is seriously wrong.

But what about that twinge in our knees or lower back?  That feeling in the back of our thighs when we bend over to tie our shoes?  Those can be a little more ambiguous.

When our muscles get too tight, it hurts to stretch them, sometimes a lot.  I don’t believe in pain for the sake of pain; it’s best if it is for a purpose.  If we have pain from tight muscles, we want to warm them up a bit first and then gently stretch them to a place where we feel tension, but not so much pain that we can’t cope.  We know it’s the right amount of stretch if our muscles relax into it after a few seconds and we find we can more a little farther if we want to.

If we happen to be getting older, we may find that we are beginning to get arthritic.  It happens to pretty much all of us.  Our joints don’t want to move the way they used to and they whine about it.  However, synovial joints, like those in our hips, get their nourishment by moving, not from blood flow.  What this means is that if we don’t move them, they get worse.  Ideally, we take all our joints through their full range of motion daily.  The range we don’t use, we don’t get to keep.

Sometimes one part hurts because another part is slacking off.  This happens with low back pain a lot.  When we don’t use our abdominals enough, the muscles in the lower back have to do all the work, which makes them angry and resentful.  Knee pain can happen because we’re not using our glutes enough or because our ankles are not doing their fair share.

Pain is a messenger.  It’s up to us to figure out how to interpret what it has to say so we can send it on its way.