I am, perhaps, a little countercultural for a personal trainer. I really hate the slogan, “No pain, no gain.” A lot. Pain is there for a reason, and the reason is not to make us stronger, but to make us stop when we need to.
This is not to say that working out is always as comfortable as lying in bed or as fun as a birthday party. Sometimes we do have to do some things we’d rather not. Very few exercises actually hurt (looking at you, hamstring curls with the TRX) if we are doing them correctly. I will always be honest about exercises that may not be the most pleasant, I will explain why I want us to do them, and, if they are not appropriate for the person in front of me, I’ll substitute something else.
We need to understand the difference between discomfort and pain. Discomfort is the feeling we have when we’re out of breath because we’re doing some challenging cardio or when our muscles are fatigued on the last rep of a set. Pain is the feeling that accompanies injury—the sprained ankle, the broken arm, the torqued back. When we feel pain, the appropriate response is to stop what we are doing, period. It is not something to push through or buck up under or whatever macho suck-it-up phrase we want to use. If we do keep going when there is pain, we are asking to make our injury worse, our recovery longer, and our lives more miserable.
Discomfort, on the other hand, means that we are doing what we need to do to grow. We need to put up with it during our workouts, but once the workouts are done, I am a big believer in making it go away. That might mean rest, or Ibuprofen if that is something we can take, or extra hydration, or a hot bath or shower, or ice.
It doesn’t have to be horrible, dear ones.
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