By Request: Why are you making me do this exercise that hurts?

This month, I’m taking requests for things folks want to know about fitness (yes, please!  Ask me questions and I will blog the answers!).

Why are you making me do this exercise that hurts?

 

OK, so first of all, we have to discuss the difference between discomfort, soreness, and pain.  Discomfort happens when we do things we’re not used to doing, when we ask our bodies to move in ways that we haven’t before or haven’t in a long time.  Soreness is one of the results of working hard, and as we work out more, we learn to tell when we are sore enough but not too sore; this helps us figure out how hard to work out.  Pain is a way our body alerts us to possible danger.  We know to pull our hands away from a hot stove, to stop running when there is sharp pain in our knee or hip or ankle, to avoid our mean friend the day after a bad haircut.

 

I will never ask anyone to do something in a workout that intentionally causes pain.  (Accidents happen, and so do injuries.  I do my best to keep clients safe, but I am not God.)  When I do ask folks to do things that are uncomfortable, I will say that it’s probably not going to be fun.  We are adults.  We theoretically understand that we sometimes have to do unpleasant things to get the things we want.  (This is the whole basis of our employment system.)

 

An example:  there is an exercise that I have clients do (and that I do myself, every day) in which we lie with yoga tune up balls positioned on our backs just above the place where those of us who wear bras find our bra straps.  We put our straight arms above our chests and move them from side to side with several variations.  It is… spicy, particularly when we don’t do it very often.  I do it and I ask clients to do it because of the payoff.

 

In the case of this exercise, the payoff is greater mobility in the thoracic spine, improved breathing mechanics, better posture, and generally better alignment in daily life.  That seems worth the two minutes of discomfort.

 

We are all lovely unique humans with varying responses to stimuli.  My pain is not anyone else’s pain.  All my clients have both the right and the responsibility to push back against what I ask them to do.  In my math, the benefits outweigh the discomfort, but their math may vary.

 

I’m not into gratuitous pain, for myself or anyone else!