How Exercise Helps Manage Pain

Exercise breaks the pain cycle. According to documentation published by the War Related Injury and Study Center (WRISC), an inactive lifestyle creates a cycle of fatigue, muscle weakness, decreased fitness, pessimism, and disinterest in exercise. It’s not easy in the beginning and it may present you with painful flare ups. But once the pain cycle is broken through exercise, a new cycle is created. An active lifestyle creates a cycle of increased activity, increased ability to perform daily activities, optimism, and interest in exercise. Benefits of exercise with chronic pain include: a decrease in pain, fatigue, anxiety and depression, and joint and muscle pain. 

Exercise lowers your pain threshold.

There is evidence that routine physical activity can lower our pain threshold significantly. A study performed on 24 individuals, by researchers at the University of New South Wales, suggested greatly that exercise training greatly increased individual pain tolerance. At the beginning of the study, all 24 individuals had their pain thresholds tested. After, half the group agreed to routinely exercise for 6 weeks while the other half of the group continued their normal lives.

The entire group returned, and every individual had their pain threshold retested. The results were clear, those who participated in physical activity had a significant increase in their pain tolerance. Some of the researchers suggested it was because those who participated in the exercise training became less threatened by the pain. Others suggested it was a physiological change by the exercise that allowed the individuals to accept the pain more easily, without notice.

Exercise provides you with endorphins.

Endorphins are hormones that are naturally released in the pituitary gland and the parts of the brain. You may be wondering, what do endorphins have to do with pain? Endorphins promote mental health. Often, chronic physical pain takes a toll on one mentally. Endorphins can help fight off anxiety and depression associated with chronic pain.

Endorphins are natural pain relievers.

Endorphins travel through the nervous system and serve to block pain receptors. According to Dr. Melissa Conrad Stoppler, endorphins attach to opiate receptors to reduce the perception of pain.

Exercise promotes healing.

The act of exercise itself isn’t going to heal your body overnight. But the effects of routine, long term exercise can help your body self-repair over time. When we are stressed or painful, our bodies are put in a chronic repetitive stress response, which is doing us no good. Cortisol is the stress hormone released and has very inflammatory effects on the body causing us to feel tense and stiff. Dr. Lisa Rankin, author of Mind over Medicine says it best “when you turn off your stress responses, turn on your relaxation responses and allow the body to do one of the things it does best – heal.”

Exercise relieves joint and muscle pain.

Stretching, walking, swimming and even light weight training can help relieve joint pain. When our joints become stiff, they stop producing normal fluid and become inflamed and painful instead. And it makes sense if you think about it. If you leave a car in the garage and never take it out for a drive, the motor and all its specialized parts that work so beautifully together get rusty and can even stop working. Nathan Wei, M.D. and rheumatologist, says keeping our joints moving and grooving, it helps to reduce inflammation and strengthen muscles around the joints, allowing for an increase in healthy blood flow.