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Training through Pain

‘NO PAIN NO GAIN’.

The common mantra you hear across ‘hardcore’ gyms around the world.Especially in the MMA world.

According to some, if you can’t put up with a little pain, you’re not a man. Well, it’s all B-S-.Kinda.

Here’s the thing… There are different types of ‘pain’ that can happen when you’re training… There’s the burning pain you get in your muscles when you’re pushing yourself through an extra few reps of bench presses or bicep curls that’s a result of excess ‘lactic acid’ buildup in the muscles. This is the type of pain that you want to train through and go beyond, as you know there’s no unwanted damage occurring and you’re not going to cause an injury.

With intense focus and determination, you can often gut out a few more sets compared to when you’re easy on yourself and you don’t have a partner urging you on. One thing to remember is to ALWAYS TRAIN IN PERFECT TECHNIQUE. That means you immediately stop when form breaks down.

If you’re in a fight and you start getting a bit tired, do you think it’s acceptable to have sloppy form?

Obviously not!So train the way you want to fight. Another little tip I always tell my fighters when we’re training hard is to keep a ‘poker face’ (unlike the pic below).

Even if you’re exhausted, don’t let your opponent know it by making faces like you’ve been constipated for the last 7 days and you’re about to unleash the fury! Keep a calm, collected expression and you won’t energize your opponent by looking like you’re almost done.

This generally comes at the end of a hard set or during an intense interval type workout.

Yes, you’ve gotta go hard, but think of it as a controlled aggression, not an all-out, uncontrolled fury.

Other types of pain that you’re going to experience sooner or later include sharp, stabbing type pains where you just know something’s not right. These are the things you want to avoid during training for two reasons.

One - you’re likely causing more damage to already injured tissues, which will lead to a more severe injury and lost training time.

Two - the pain will likely be causing changes in movement and motor patterns, which will lead to compensation injuries in the future.

Here’s an example…When you sprain your ankle, your body wants to stay away from weight-bearing on your left leg.Do this over and over and your body soon starts to avoid using the left leg during all different types of movements. So say you start squatting heavy and because your body is trained to avoid the left leg, your body deviates to the right, putting damaging stresses on the lumbar spine and hips, resulting in an injury whenever you try to squat heavy!

You’ve got to avoid these compensatory movement patterns at all costs, because it takes a lot of specific exercise and rehab to break these patterns. If you’ve had any injuries from training or anything that you think may be disrupting proper movement patterns, leave them in the comments section below and let’s analyze them to see if they may pose a problem for you: