Firstly, what is pain?
Pain is one of the most important signals for our survival. It occurs when sensory receptors in the body send signals to the brain, in response to stimuli that it deems as dangerous or unsafe. The brain then may perceive pain (depending on further information the body gathers), which is described as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.
The most important thing to remember about pain is that no two people feel pain the same way, even if the reasons for pain are alike.
Types of Pain and Pain Patterns
Pain can be either specific, or non-specific depending on the mechanism.
Non-specific pain is when there is no identifiable structure, specific disease or damage to the body. The most common example of non-specific pain is lower back pain, where the World Health Organization estimates that around 90% of low back pain is non-specific.
Specific pain on the other hand, occurs when sensory receptors send signals that a tissue or structure is damaged, which results in hypersensitivity of this area. Interestingly, this can explain why sometimes after an injury has healed, you may still experience pain, because the body remembers this stimulus and becomes more hyperaware.
There are three primary patterns of pain:
Acute pain is one that starts suddenly, and ends once the affected structure is healed. Common examples are strained muscles, broken bones, or burns.
Episodic pain occurs at irregular intervals, and is often paired with a chronic pain condition that has periods of flare-ups. Conditions may include headaches and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Chronic pain occurs for more than three months and generally refers to persisting pain (such as lower back pain) or pain associated with a chronic condition. Chronic pain can affect a person’s mood, function and ability to work.
Now we know what pain is, can exercise help?
Most people in response to pain will stop exercise activity or fall into a cycle of boom/bust. Both of these are negative behaviours that will only contribute to further non-movement and increase sensitivity of the affected injury/structures. The boom bust cycle in particular involves doing too much when you feel good until you ultimately ‘bust’, where your nervous system is then flooded with pain signals for days-weeks until the cycle repeats.
However, the right amount of exercise offers many benefits for pain (especially chronic pain). As a whole, exercise can desensitise the body, strengthen surrounding structures, decrease load on joints and improve mental health, all which decrease pain.
For example, resistance training can strengthen the affected and surrounding muscles to improve physical function such as climbing stairs, while walking can help to build endurance, desensitise pain and assist weight loss to decrease load on painful joints.
However, exercise has also been shown to be effective for pain by impacting your mental, emotional and psychological wellbeing. For example, exercise not only increases dopamine levels to improve mood, but also has a positive effect on neurotransmitters and can reduce your perception of pain (i.e less pain signals being sent). Subsequently, this has a positive impact on sleep, which is a large contributor to pain perception.
Most importantly, regular consistent exercise has been proven to decrease the risk of recurrence of pain and re-injury. That’s why we, as allied health professionals, strive to find exercise that you enjoy, to increase the longevity of your health through continued movement, even when you’ve been discharged.
To summarise, exercise is an effective and beneficial treatment for pain through combined effects on multiple systems of the body that improve physical and psychological well-being. While we understand that exercise is not something everyone enjoys, here at Connect, we target your specific goals and needs to increase motivation and positive outcomes.