‘No pain, no gain’ — no thank you
Experts warn ‘no days off’ fitness lifestyle can lead to injury, illness and exhaustion
While training for a half-marathon last fall, Janet Sherman, 57, started noticing pain in her right leg and left foot. A diagnosis of a quadriceps strain and plantar fasciitis led to shoe inserts and cross-training. Before long, the Wyoming-based teacher was “just good enough” to get back to training, and so she did, although she opted to drop down to a shorter 10 km race distance.
On race day, Sherman’s foot began bothering her early, and by a water stop two-thirds of the way through the course, she knew she should drop out. “It was so painful, but I was stubborn and finished out the race,” she said. “Afterward, I could barely walk.”
Sherman recognizes that failing to quit the race probably led to a month-long layoff from the sport she loves. “If I say I’m going to complete a goal, however, I’m going to complete it,” she said. “I regret that I couldn’t pull the plug psychologically.”
To the inactive, Sherman’s attitude might be hard to understand. But for amateur athletes and weekend warriors, pushing through pain is a common refrain. “As a society, we are more active in sports than ever before,” said Adrienne Langelier, a Texas-based sports psychology consultant. “But at the same time, as a culture we have developed a ‘no days off ’ mentality.”
That needs to change, said Mark Cucuzzella, a physician and a professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine. “‘No pain, no gain’ — no thank you,” he quipped. “For too long, we have glamorized that way of thinking. It’s not sustainable.”
There are plenty of contributing factors to our society’s “push until it hurts” approach. Cucuzzella speculated that some of it began decades ago with the NFL and associated sports-brand advertising. “We were given the message that in order to succeed, we needed punishing workouts,” he said. “In the short term, that might work, but the burden of proof now shows that it’s damaging in the long run.”
Some who become immersed in a sport fear a loss of hard-earned fitness if they take off even a day or two. “People worry that if they stop, they won’t start again,” Langelier said.
But pressing too hard can lead to injury, illness and exhaustion. With running, for instance, pushing through pain can lead to a secondary injury, said Adam Tenforde of the Spaulding National Running Center at Harvard Medical School. “A stress fracture, if you continue to run on it, may progress to a full fracture and require a much longer recovery period, for example,” he said.
Langelier said that reframing rest as part of training can also be helpful. “Leave some time in there for taking care of yourself,” she said, “and make it an integral part of your training.”
There are signs the tides are beginning to turn.
Jonathan Levitt, 28, a Bostonbased sales manager, has been part of a new push to make rest more alluring. Levitt joined with U.S. Olympic swimmer Caroline Burckle and elite Spartan course racer Amelia Boone to create the hashtag #restdaybrags on social media in January 2017.
Levitt is a big believer that athletes need to understand that stress is stress, no matter where it is coming from. “I see amateurs who want to train like pros, and they end up getting hurt,” he said. “They forget that pros have a schedule that allows for all the rest and recovery they need, without a job interfering. The rest of us need to balance our hard training with low- and no-effort training.”