What Is Pain?

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. It does not just involve the physical, but also emotions and other factors. Not all types of pain are the same, and have different causes, symptoms, and treatment. Acute pain can also become chronic pain. Pain is the signal to let your body know something is wrong, and to prevent further damage.

Factors That Influence Pain

1. Not living a healthy lifestyle

Not sleeping well, lack of quality nutrition, and poor movement practices can all influence pain levels. These will all weaken the nervous system, which will heighten pain.

2. Emotional stress

If you have a lot of emotional stress on top of an injury, it’s going to take longer to heal. This is because stress of any kind takes resources from your body that could go into healing.

3. The mind

There is something in science called  the placebo effect. This is used for clinical trials as the control. Patients are given nothing, but they believe they’re receiving treatments. When the patients believe they’re receiving treatment, they get better an average of 33% of the time. This is the power of our minds. Something less talked about is the nocebo effect, which is the opposite of the placebo. This is when your given a negative injunction, whether it’s 6 months to live, or an incurable disease. Immediate fear arises and your body responds accordingly. The thing that you believe that will happen will largely influence the outcome. You have the power to be well, but that power starts in our mind.

Common Mistakes While Healing An Injury

1. Immobilization

Your body requires movement in order to heal itself. There are some instances where full immobilization is necessary for a severe injury, but for the most part, active recovery is the best option. Progressively get better by moving, but not pushing past the pain threshold.

2. Icing

Icing has been used for a long time for injuries, but is it really helping. The idea is to reduce inflammation so the body can heal, What tends to happen is that the tissue and surrounding fluid get frozen to the point where the inflammatory products can’t get out, and the healing factors can’t get into the site. Also, too much cold therapy after exercise can inhibit recovery because you would be blunting the hormetic response to exercise.

Recovery Tactics-

1. Proteolytic enzymes

These are protein digesting enzymes that get in the bloodstream and breakdown fibrinogen, which is a waste product of muscle breakdown. These are best taken on en empty stomach so they don’t digest your food instead of helping you recover. Some great brands are Kion Flex, and Masszymes.

2. EAAs

EAAs (essential amino acids) are critical for recovery. This is because all 9 EAAs are required for muscle protein synthesis. Most foods have a relatively low amino acid utilization profile. Eggs being the highest at 48%. When you use a supplement, it’s going to be 99% utilization.

3. Sauna

Heat exposure has been shown to increase muscle hypertrophy, or the gain of muscle strength, and mass. It also helps you to keep muscle better when not exercising. Sauna exposure causes thermal stress in the body, which causes the body to release heat shock proteins to increase cellular antioxidant capacity, and enhance mitochondrial function.