Embrace the pain

Some of my best friends are soccer players, which makes the latest research on pain perception in athletes all the sweeter. Psychologists at the University of Tromsø in Norway put elite soccer players, elite endurance athletes (including runners and cross-country skiers) and matched non-athlete controls through a series of three pain tests. The results confirmed that endurance athletes are unusually adept at shrugging off discomfort.

The first test measured pain tolerance by seeing how long subjects could keep their hand submerged in ice water. The controls lasted 114 seconds on average, and the soccer players lasted 117 seconds. In contrast, virtually all the endurance athletes reached the 180-second safety cutoff.

The second test measured pain threshold by applying a piece of heated metal to their inner forearm, gradually increasing the temperature and asking the subjects to press a button when the sensation changed from warmth to pain. This time, the endurance athletes and soccer players were effectively tied, sensing pain at around 47.7 C, while the non-athletes had a lower threshold of 46.6 C.

The final test measured pain sensitivity, asking the subjects to quantify their pain on a scale of 0 to 100 when the metal was heated to 47.5 degrees for 30 seconds. The non-athletes rated their pain as 59 out of 100 on average, compared to the soccer players at 52 and the endurance athletes at just 46.

Beyond making runners feel good about themselves, the goal of the study was to understand which psychological factors contribute to the ability to handle discomfort. Psychological questionnaires showed that the most pain-resistant subjects had high levels of grit (and the closely related psychological trait of conscientiousness) and low levels of fear of pain – all essential attributes for runners.