Are you experiencing excessive muscle soreness with increases to your physical activity routine? Pain, tenderness or discomfort are signals from your body which can indicate a wide variety of adaptations or underlying dysfunction. Good pain/discomfort vs. Bad pain is important to understand to avoiding injury while continuing to make progress towards your fitness goals.
“Good pain/discomfort” (Feeling the burn!) - This is defined as a healthy challenge of your body and musculoskeletal system. Training often requires a certain level of determination and toughness to push beyond mild discomforts to achieve desired response and improvements in strength and endurance. Any pain or discomfort should be tolerable with gradual onset directly related to duration and intensity of activity. If so, listen to your body but keep on pushing! Muscle soreness from a recent previous workout or training session can be classified as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), which is considered common and normal. Be sure to properly warm-up and stretch to minimize this type of muscle soreness and recover faster.
“Bad pain” (Ouch!) - Any sharp, stabbing or pinching sensation is likely doing damage. Avoid any pain or discomfort that “doesn’t feel right” or is persistent and does not dissipate with repeated exposure/activity. Notice if you find yourself having to sacrifice proper form or compensate during an exercise to favour an area of your body. Does pain intensify before fatigue sets in? If this describes what you’re experiencing, you are most likely doing more harm than good.
Excessive or persistent muscle soreness and/or pain and discomfort is a sign that something needs to be addressed. It’s important to identify the source of the issue so that you can employ the right strategy to correct it. The therapists here at CFFHP are trained to identify any biomechanical issue or dysfunction through a comprehensive assessment of your muscles, nerves, joints and movement patterns. Once an accurate diagnosis is achieved, our therapists determine what is required in terms of specific treatment and corrective/therapeutic exercises so you can stop experiencing “bad pain” and maximize your improvements with training.
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