Coming back from an injury, everyone tells you to be careful and “listen to your body.” Great advice… except your body doesn’t always tell the truth.
I tell my clients that one of the hardest parts of fitness is knowing when you’re being a wimp versus when you’re being an idiot. I’ve lived most of my life on the idiot end of that spectrum (I have the battle scars to prove it) and plenty of people live on the other end, holding back when they need to push. We’re all somewhere on that line.
Here’s what makes it truly hard: pain receptors can become oversensitive. I had a strained hamstring for three years. Every time I thought it had healed, I’d train and get pain, so I assumed it was still injured. Except it wasn’t. The tissue had spent so long firing pain signals that my nociceptors were simply oversensitized. Everything that engaged that hamstring hurt, even when nothing was being harmed. The fix was doing light exercises that DID hurt, and continuing anyway. Weeks later the pain faded — not because the muscle healed (it already had), but because over time with repeated stimulus it got desensitized.
And the flip side: protection makes you fragile. In 2014 I had anterior ankle impingement, so I bought the biggest hiking boots the thrift store had and trained in them for months. Very supportive. Very comfortable. My clients made fun of me, which was a bonus. Then one day in regular tennis shoes I jogged fifty feet to the drinking fountain, and got stabbing pain in both ankles within three steps. All that support had lowered my tissue tolerance further and further. (The actual cure came from a parkour website: ankle drops off a step, 30-50 reps, building up to daily. I was terrified they’d break my ankles. Instead, after the first try my ankles felt maybe-kinda a little better, and four weeks later they were cured.)
So how do you know if the pain you’re feeling is something being strengthened, or something being damaged? The rule I gave our Q&A group:
Do the risky thing once, carefully. Then give it 48 to 72 hours and see how things shake out. Feel the same or better? Do it again, maybe a little more. Feel worse? That was too much — scale back. As Gina put it, far more succinctly than me: time will tell.
You have to be willing to take some risks and even endure some pain — just do it in a structured, scientific way, and let the 48-72 hour verdict make the call.
From our monthly community Q&A inside Stronger. Faster. Younger. Come bring your own beat-up body parts — I’ve probably injured the same ones.
