Athlete Pain

The gym wasn't too crowded. You nodded to some buddies and launched into the program the trainer had laid out for you six months earlier, a combination of cardiovascular work and weight training. You were making progress. You could feel it, see it in the mirror. You grabbed a pair of dumbbells. After a few reps, a sharp, burning pain stabbed your left elbow. Your first thought was: Ignore it. Work through it. It'll go away. But six reps later, it felt like someone had trained a blowtorch on the joint. You had to stop. *** The Club Med offered beach volleyball. You'd played occasionally in gyms but never in sand. But how hard could it for a guy who worked out three times a week? You and your buddy played two other vacationers. You started out slow and friendly, but after a few volleys with various girlfriends cheering, things got serious. Before you knew it, you were diving into the sand to make plays--and searing pain kicked you in the groin. You had trouble hobbling off the court. *** Tennis was never your game, but the new girlfriend played, so you figured what the hell. She was a decent player, but you had little difficulty keeping up. Tennis was fun. If the relationship went anywhere, you could see getting into it. You played for 90 minutes, then went to her place, where you showered, made dinner, and capped the evening with a horizontal workout. The next morning, you could hardly move. Your legs ached something fierce. GOOD PAIN VS. BAD PAIN An old proverb declares: "He who preaches patience has never known pain." Ain't it the truth. When you're hurting you want what that old pain-reliever commercial promised: fast, Fast, FAST relief. But there's another side to pain, the side that tells us something is wrong. Poet David Seegal called pain our "messenger of harm, Nature's poignant alarm, often man's wily friend. To signal is to mend." Just as there are two sides to pain--the suffering and the signal of injury--in athletes, there are two types of pain, bad and good. Bad pain is what happened to our weight lifter and beach volleyball player. The former developed tendinitis, specifically tennis elbow, one of several common overuse injuries marked by painful inflammation of the fibrous tissue that connects muscle bone. Tendinitis can strike any major joint, says Lynn Millar, Ph.D., P.T., a professor of physical therapy at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, and a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). It's a signal that the muscle attached to the affected tendon--in tennis elbow, the forearm muscle--is not strong enough to handle the demand placed on it. The tendon has to help out, but shouldn't, so it becomes overworked, inflamed--and very painful. Sprains cause similar pain and inflammation in ligaments, which attach bone to bone. Then there's bursitis, which also causes pain and inflammation--but of the bursae (singular, bursa), small fluid-filled sacs around the major joints. Our volleyball player strained--or "pulled"--a groin muscle, a common traumatic injury caused by hyperextension, usually a quick move the affected muscle isn't conditioned to handle. Muscles are like cloth, Millar explains. They are made of fibrous tissue. Like the fibers in cloth, hyperextension can rip some muscle fibers. If a substantial number of the fibers in a muscle rip, you have a pulled muscle. If they all go, you have a "torn" muscle. With tendinitis and pulled and torn muscles, the pain typically appears suddenly and feels sharp, severe, and weakening, says Scott Hasson, Ed.D., a professor of physical therapy at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Such pain announces that something is very wrong, and requires immediate treatment. A good Natural Pain Relief, is what happened to our tennis player. Many hours after his workout, he developed delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS). DOMS results from new workouts that tax muscles you haven't called on before, or from exertion a bit beyond what conditioned muscles are prepared to handle. When pushed somewhat beyond their conditioning, a small number of muscle fibers tear, Hasson says. These micro-injuries are not severe enough to cause the immediate pain of a pulled or torn muscle. But the body responds to any injury with inflammation. In DOMS, this inflammation causes dull, aching soreness 12 to 72 hours later.