How To Use Exercise To Treat Physical Pain

You’ve heard it 100 times… “Exercise is good for you!” As a personal trainer and health coach, I absolutely agree. Moving your body always helps to increase blood flow, lubricate joints, increase strength and mobility and regulate mood.

However, if you want to use exercise as a therapeutic tool to treat physical pain, then movement without conscious choice will not cut it. Solutions come from purposeful exercises done consciously to balance strength patterns in your body. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned after working with people to manage their pain and movement challenges for over 17 years, is that there is a huge difference between choosing and implementing your exercise regimen consciously, versus just exercising to look good.

‘Why can’t I just go walking or swimming or go to the gym to get rid of my physical pain’? You can absolutely do that, and it will most likely help. But without incorporating strength exercises for dormant muscles, and stretching exercises for hypertonic muscles into your movement regimen, you run the risk of exacerbating an already imbalanced strength pattern that will cause you pain and harm in the long run.

When we exercise without consciously engaging specific muscles, we’re relying on the body’s subconscious knowledge of movement, leaving it to decide which muscles get to lead and which ones get to relax. The over-developed muscles in the body then have ‘open season’ to govern the way the actions are played out, thereby supporting an already-unbalanced system of movement.

Let’s use the simple example of the hamstrings while cycling. I’ve given countless massages to cyclists clocking around 300 miles per week on their bikes. A lot of them came to me complaining about hamstring tightness that they could not get rid of no matter how much they stretched them. Their assumption was that the hamstrings were tight from overuse, but it’s just the opposite.

Humans spend a predominant amount of their time sitting and standing without conscious engagement — which trains the quads, (the front of the leg) to be hyper-shortened and “on” a predominant amount of the time, and for the hamstrings, (the back of the legs) to be hyper-lengthened and “off” the same amount of time. Not only are the hamstrings at a suboptimal length this whole time, but we’re also pinning them down with our body weight, which furthers the decrease of blood flow and hydration to this huge muscle group. Chronic lack of hydration makes the muscle fibers stick to each other and to the fascia and muscles around them, which further decreases the hamstrings’ ability to fire well, and increases tension. When a person then gets on a bike, they expect that their muscles will know what to do to make the bike go. And the muscles do know, but they’re still in the default state of sitting and are still dehydrated. So even though the cyclist is on a bike, their body will still use the strength patterns they’ve spent thousands of hours unconsciously developing over a lifetime of sitting and standing. The quads are still “on” and the hamstrings are still “off”. When someone tries to use their hamstrings on a bike, the hamstrings are either slow to respond, they respond partially and tire easily, or they freeze up. The worst-case scenario is that they actually tear…which is an injury I’ve seen many times on cyclists and sprinters.

The lack of the hamstring’s ability to work properly puts more emphasis on the body’s need to use the quads in order to make the legs move, exacerbating quad dominance. There’s a domino effect from here, leading to chronic hip and/or back pain, which is a prevalent issue in our modern society. This imbalanced muscle relationship happens in other muscle groups of the body as well, causing various points of pain, lack of mobility, and increased susceptibility to injury. The only way to interrupt these imbalanced muscle relationships is through conscious re-education of the muscles, so consistently over time that the lesson becomes subconscious and the body starts organizing muscle relationships correctly on its own.

Movement is an important part of a self-care regimen.

Hands-down, over my entire career, my happiest clients despite age, financial background, or ethnicity, have been those who are physically active in some way. You can take your self-care to the next level by incorporating conscious self-care exercises into your movement regimen. For example, I go running once or twice and go hiking once per week. My other two days of movement are my “self-care days”. These are the days when I foam roll, stretch some muscles and engage others to keep myself in neuromuscular balance. During the 6.5 years of my Crossfit and extreme fitness career, I accumulated nine significant injuries. I tried chiropractors, physical therapists, doctors, massage therapists, and trainers, but no one could completely rehab my injuries. Once I became a personal trainer, I began rehabilitating myself, and can happily say that I no longer have chronic pain or mobility issues. At the beginning of my journey back to muscle wellness, I practiced my self-care regimen five days per week, for two years straight. In this way, I got rid of all of the pain patterns I used to have, and have not injured myself in years. I have also helped many of my clients do the same.

Health and wellness take active Self-parenting. When we care for another person, or even an animal in our lives, in order to care for them well, we have to make conscious, educated choices. If we just wing it every day and don’t think about how to make sure our kids and our pets are eating healthily, sleeping, and being loved well, we will end up with more problems than blessings. The same is true when we parent ourselves. I understand that on the whole, many of us are over-stimulated and decision-fatigued. Going to the gym and checking out while we practice self-care allows us to get some much-needed brain relaxation. However, it would be much more beneficial to get that brain relaxation we need through meditation, breathing, or a good night’s sleep, instead of when we’re exercising.

Here are the four aspects of good self-parenting in your exercise regimen:

1. Get help to learn your body’s specific shortcomings and needs.

2. Learn what self-care practices provide the most valuable re-programming for your body’s recovery.

3. Consciously, and CONSISTENTLY practice your self-care regimen.

4. When it’s no longer working, get help to figure out what has changed or what you’re doing incorrectly (back to #1).

Lateral hip engagement is a great corrective exercise for low back pain and quad tightness

The lesson I get to happily remind my clients of over and over…and over… again is to become aware of their bodies and their choices. I encourage you to learn how it feels to contract each muscle of your body. It will be difficult to feel some muscles contracting, or to even make them contract at all because they’re dormant. With much practice, you can consciously engage those dormant muscles and learn how to strengthen them. The more you work at it, the more you educate the neural pathway that connects your brain to the muscles you’re focusing on. You’re literally teaching these neural pathways to work again.

It’s so empowering to know that you can decrease your physical pain through conscious exercise choices. Stick to the four aspects of good self-parenting, above. Be honest with yourself. The knowledge you need is out there. You just need to find the right person to help you, and you need to believe that you can heal.