We’ve all heard the phrase “no pain no gain”, but if sport can teach us anything it’s that the perceptions of pain and how we deal with it couldn’t be more different between two similar people.

Competitive sport is a situation that many people might view as painful, especially armchair athletes. However it appears that being athletic actually reduces the perceptions of pain. In a review published in the journal ‘pain’, researchers found that athletes and those that are recreationally active experience pain from the same stimulus, but athletes can tolerate this pain for a prolonged period whereas the recreationally active cannot (Tesarz et al., 2012).

These findings have been replicated in healthy active adults, where individuals who engage in regular moderate or vigorous exercise can tolerate pain for longer, with this tolerance increasing with longer-term exercise (Jones et al., 2014).

This might indicate that a coping strategy is adopted by athletes and physically active individuals in order to continue activity, or that exercise induces physiological changes associated with pain signals and sensations. Either way this gives further credibility to research that exercise is a useful strategy for coping with pain in associated medical conditions.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Sources

Jones, M. D., Booth, J., Taylor, J. L. & Barry, B. K. (2014). Aerobic training increases pain tolerance in healthy individuals. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Publish ahead of print February.

Tesarz, J., Schuster, A. K., Hartmann, M., Gerhardt, A. & Eich, W. (2012). Pain perception in athletes compared to normally active controls: a systematic review with meta-analysis. Pain, 153(6), 1253-62.

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