Pain does NOT mean damage ❌.
Something I hear a lot from patients is that they don’t want to do more “damage” to their body while they are in pain. They avoid most activities that cause pain because they think this will worsen their condition.
But just because you have pain doesn’t mean that a physical tissue is damaged. This becomes increasing less likely as time goes on - if you’ve had pain for weeks/months, it is even less likely there is actual damage to the tissue.
Pain is a response from the brain to stop doing certain movements or activities to protect your body. This is fine after acute injuries, eg. you tear a muscle - your body wants you to stop moving it to help it heal. Where this becomes a problem is when the brain continuously sends these signals even after the tissue has healed. This is the basis for most chronic pain patients. The pain stimulus is overactive, kind of like a “false alarm”.
This is why it’s important to SLOWLY expose your body to these movements that cause pain in order to break the cycle. Avoiding them completely is counterproductive. We need to slowly let the brain know you are not in trouble and that these movements are safe. This can be done by changing the movement temporarily, changing the tempo, load, frequency, or a number of other factors to work around your injury.
We can help you with this!
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