6 Pain and Injury Phrases That Need to Die

Fitness and health, like many industries, are rife with misinformation. With pain and injury, especially, there are common phrases used that give people the wrong idea at best, and cause people to do things outside of their best interests at worst.

Let's clear things up.

1. "No pain, no gain."
   

I'm all for people challenging themselves, but a surprising number of people believe that exercise genuinely has to hurt for it to be effective.

Many of the pain and injury cases I come across involve individuals trying to increase their performance every time they work out.

One client was trying to lift more every single time he stepped into the gym and trained to failure until his body shut down.

Another client was convinced that every time she stepped outside to run, she had to go further and run faster. She developed plantar fasciitis and a hip tear.

No pain, no gain, contributes to people pushing past their limits and ignoring signs from their bodies that they need to stop.

The greatest skill you can have in terms of staying active and achieving longevity with your activity is knowing when to push and when to back off and recover. If you're always pushing, you will eventually suffer the consequences.

It's cool that pain and gain rhyme, but we need a new phrase for exercise motivation.

2. "You're out of alignment."

Physios and chiropractors love using alignment as a scapegoat as to why you're in pain.

"Your left leg is longer than your right." "Your right shoulder is more mobile than your left."

Naturally, we think something is wrong with us and needs correcting, but this isn't true at all.

Humans are not built symmetrically. Roughly 70-90% of people have a leg length discrepancy. Less than 2% of people have a symmetrical face. It's just not reality.

So when someone says you're out of alignment, what are they saying? That we fall outside of some arbitrary range?

Everyone has a different spinal curve, for example, with some being more severe than others. It's not a reliable predictor of pain and injury, because we find people who fall outside of "optimal" ranges who have zero pain, and people who have "good" alignment who are in pain.

In other words, being in alignment doesn't have any true meaning. Who's to say what good alignment is if we're all built differently? And how does a practitioner evaluate objectively when someone is out of alignment?

There are too many ways to poke holes in this statement, and it largely creates fear and obsessive corrective behaviour.

3. "Wear and tear."

The belief that exercise has an "orthopedic cost" is prevalent among the general population.

"I can't run anymore because it's not good for my knees." "I can do pushups anymore because it hurts my shoulders."

"I can't lift anything heavy because my doctor told me not to at my age." Your body is not a car. A car develops wear and tear with more mileage. A human body is stressed, literally regenerates, and adapts to better handle that same stress later. This is what living tissue does.

It can adapt to anything, from lifting weights to certain diets and different climates. That's why there's no such thing as a bad exercise or movement, because as long as you give your body a chance to adapt, it's capable of doing so.

What we commonly believe is wear and tear is us simply doing too much too fast and blaming the exercise.

Is running the problem, or did you try to do a 5k after not running for years? Is heavy lifting bad for you, or have you not lifted anything in weeks, so when you tried, you hurt your back?

Our bodies work on a "wear and repair" model. Get good sleep, eat good food, and give yourself a chance to recover, and you will.

4. "Degeneration."

This is a major term that tends to show up in imaging and scan results. Like "wear and tear", it's a phrase that sparks fear and tends to lead to resistance to exercise.

You may find that you show signs of degeneration in your spinal discs or of the meniscus in your knee. These findings show up in most people and are more common the older we get.

However, they are poor predictors of pain and injury risk. Similar to alignment, we find people with signs of degeneration with zero pain and those without any signs who have pain.

What should show up as an asterisk beside any degeneration results is, "degeneration can refer to any normal age-related changes and are not necessarily a sign of damage or concern".

I wish this was explained better, along with any imaging results. How do you think someone will feel about exercise and lifting (something beneficial for everyone regardless of age) when they hear that they have degeneration in their spine without this caveat?

Ironically, not being active and taking care of your body will result in the most damage as you age. It's not your age that's the problem; it's how you treat yourself.

5. "Perfect form."

Just like there's no such thing as perfect alignment, there's no such thing as perfect form. If you line up 30 different people, you will see 30 different squats. That's because we're all built differently, as mentioned before.

How can we expect a 6'4 person with long femurs squat the same way as a 5'3 person? I can't tell you how many clients come to me saying they were told to squat with feet shoulder-width apart with their toes pointed forward. When I tried to do this, I fell over.

There are certain principles you can follow when it comes to different types of movements, but all exercises are made up anyway as a means to an end.

There's more nuance to technique than having it be right or wrong. You need to take into account a person's injury history, anatomy, and their goals with an exercise.

For example, if I'm trying to get someone to squat who has knee pain, I may cue them to "sit back" more to load their hips more than their knees. Or if their goal is to build up their quads, I may elevate their heels to load their knees more.

If with exercise technique, you have to begin by saying, "it depends", then there's no such thing as perfect form.

6. "Bad back."

We tend to speak about our bodies like a '94 Chevy that's best days are behind them. Especially with our backs, we tend to label them as bad, like an apple left out too long.

When people say this to me, they're expressing some sort of vulnerability. Maybe they get pain bending over, or when they sit in a car. In this scenario, though, what's causing the pain is less important than how we think about our pain.

If you have internalized that you have a bad back, chances are your back will feel bad every time you use it. Your mindset affects your behaviours, which affect your outcomes. It's not that your back is damaged beyond repair, it's that you don't trust your back to cope when you use it.

Or you have a belief that it's fragile based on past experience. But your spine, the discs between them, and the supporting muscles are all living tissue that can heal, adapt, and become more resilient.

It's all in how you treat them.

When you come across these phrases in the wild, I hope you remember this article and think about them differently.

To your good health,

Coach Stephen

 Thanks for reading.

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