“No Pain No Gain” is still kind of true . .
Ok, hear me out. I have a little rant to share. Things tend to move in large pendulum swings in society and culture, regardless of the industry. I'd like to address the gray area about: "No Pain, No Gain." The phrase seems to have originated in a 1970's physical education cirriculum for an elementary school, although it may have been paraphrased from the ancient Greeks who wrote often about hard work, toil, and suffering on the road to excellence. Jane Fonda popularized the phrase in the 80's with her workout videos -- she used the phrase in the context of pushing through muscle burn in order to acheive fitness results. This got misconstrued over the next 20 years to mean pushing through any type of pain. You can still find it in bootcamp style classes, yoga disciplines, athletic coaching, and individuals ignoring the limits of their bodies on their way to injuries. If you're still exercising within this pendulum swing and are experiencing injuries, then yes, you may need to find other ways to motivate yourself into strength and fitness!
For everyone else, we're here twenty more years later, and the pendulum has swung toward "just listen to your body" and common advice to "just choose the exercises that you like" because you're more likely to stay consistent that way. I find two major issues with this perspective.
One.
Listening to one's body is something I practice and preach heavily -- but what happens if you're a novice at training intensely? (You can have been exercising and lifting weights for years and still be a novice at training intensely). Our bodies don't want to work hard. Working hard costs our bodies a lot of resources that they would prefer to preserve for survival. When you start an exercise, your body and heart rate are going to send your brain some signals pretty quickly that you should stop. It thinks what you're doing is a threat to your system. BUT. We know that stress produces an adaptive response in the human body so we get stronger rather than weaker when stress is applied. For the average person trying to incorporate exercise into their lives, the stress you're feeling at your stopping point is very likely not high enough to meet the threshold for strength and muscle mass adaptions. You do have to sustain some pain in the form of intense discomfort to reap the benefits of exercise induced adaptations.
In a seminal study in 1990 done in a nursing home, researchers had members of all ages and abilities lift weights to assess how their muscles adapted to stress. Some of the residents were obviously hesitant, but once the researchers asked them to mentally reframe exercise as work, the residents understood the activity differently and felt comfortable pushing harder. Exercise is work. This means, it has to feel more stressful than what you're accustomed to. Some people are better at tolerating the required discomfort than others. The good news? Being uncomfortable is a skill you can train by putting yourself in uncomfortable situations more often.
Should you still listen to your body? YES. Always. Sharp or tight sensations in the joints, radiating nerve sensations, or sudden strains in the muscles? That's not a requirement for getting stronger! Continuing to exercise under those conditions without assessing the sensations, adjusting the exercises, or monitoring the symptoms is not recommended 😅. Somatic practices like body scans meditations and gentle yoga can hone your skills to differentiate between pain that might be injurious or pain that is just really hard work.
Two.
What about doing exercises you don't like? The resistance to "no pain, no gain" has popularized the idea that we should choose the exercises that we like and discard the rest. This approach can have value. If you're really struggling to get started with exercise, choosing the type of activty that's most likely to get you going is absolutely an excellent tool. However, chances are that for the goals you have for how you want to feel, you're going to have to pepper in some of the stuff you don't love. That mobility work, those pre-hab/re-hab exercises for your wrists or knees, that jumping work that elevates your heart rate, etc.
For example, Eleanor is 82. She loves to hike outdoors and she recently had her second knee replaced. She absolutely hates agility and balance training. Well . . . no pain no gain!
Mara, 59, will happily do mobility work all day. Get her to do a challenging lunge? She hates it. But guess what one of Mara's goals is? To be able to get off the floor with more ease. The number one most accessible position to get off the floor from is a kneeling lunge . . . 🤷🏻♀️
There's nuance in everything. If we want to get stronger -- physically or figuratively -- or if we want to be able to do something we can't currently do, pain (discomfort, difficulty, friction) is most likely a part of that process. We could probably replace the phrase to say, "No intense discomfort, no gain" but that's clearly never going to go viral.
Think about what "No Pain, No Gain" means to you. If you were yelled at by your highschool coach who made you play on a sprained ankle, you may need to redefine what the phrase means so that you can still use it to motivate you in a way that resonates with what you want. If you listened to Jane Fonda and got hurt or allowed a yoga teacher to push you into a position you weren't ready for, you may need to redefine the phrase to incorporate discomfort within the boundaries of your past experiences.
Let's bring the pendulum back to center. "No pain, no gain" = Stress your system sufficiently so that it will adapt.
In the media:
How about some more Jane Fonda? Community, socializiation, and relationships are the common denominator for some of the happiest older adults in the world. I love this clip from Jane Fonda and Ashton Applewhite (anti-ageist advocate) who encourage older adults to engage in art/creativity related groups and classess to foster community, connection, and cognitive engagement.
One of the biggest obstacles in the way of advocating for strength training is the associations most people have with lifting weights, consciously and largely unconsciously. People imagine bros in their 20's and 30's, scary equipment, large biceps, toned bodies, etc. However, when we're talking about lifting weights for aging well, we need to create different associations: strong bones, better balance, preventing falls, sustained metabolic health, and staving off chronic disease. This recent Time article is a nice push in the right direction. Or skim the cliff notes here.
Till next time, keep moving!
alia