Pain And The Fine Line It Creates

I have been asked this question before, and I have also asked this of other people. Are you hurt, or are you injured? To most sports people they will know what that is, but for those who do not, I will try to explain. Most people will think of being hurt and injured are the same thing, and to some extent they are the same. The difference lies in the severity. If you are hurt you can probably work through it and continue whatever it was you were doing to hurt yourself in the first place. If you are injured you most likely will need to seek medical attention, and not continue with your activity.

I want to give credit to 24 Fit Club for indirectly giving me inspiration to write about this topic. You should go check it out as there are some good things there to read.

Pushing through the pain is a common thing for me. I have been told that you can do it and even though it hurts you can still do it. This philosophy will not work for everyone as every person's idea of pain and pushing are different. I like to watch a show called Made on MTV. The short of it is this, a person who isn't good at something wants to be good at something. They get a coach and usually five or six weeks to get good at what they want and at the end they enter some sort of contest to show that they are now good at whatever it was they were trying for. The majority of the people on that show that want to do something athletic, snowboard, play basketball, or any other sport, are not usually that in shape or athletic. I most recently watched a girl who wanted to be a ballerina. She was put on a training schedule and to her it was pretty intense. There was one scene where she was using a step machine and basically had a panic attack because it got to hard and she quit. This is where pushing through the pain needs to take place. That girl on Made was not injured, she was just hurt, and by the standards that I set earlier means she could have continued with her workout. That episode got me to thinking how do you push pass the pain.

I was always under the assumption that to push past the pain you just have to tough it out and do it. Like all advice, it is one thing to say it, and another thing to know how to do it. The first time that you get hurt you are more likely to quit than you are to keep going. I know that when I was swimming I would get a sort of leg cramp or in basketball I would say my toe hurt or some other excuse because I didn't want to continue. Looking back on that it seems odd that I would rather lie to not do something than to simply say I do not want to. I digress... Toughing it out seems to be a learned response. You get injured and you either move past it or you let it stop you. You might not always push past it, but the more times that you do, the easier it gets for you to do it. Yelling and berating someone for not being able to push past the pain, especially when it's their first opportunity to try to, is probably not the best solution to get them to try harder. There is a difference between taking a little time to be able to push past the pain, and just giving up. Most people never give the chance to allow the time it takes each individual to push past the pain and therefore they quit either by their own accord or by the actions of others.

My take on this is simply to do what your mind and body are telling it to do. Your mind and body are both amazing resilient things and when pushed, it will deliver the results that you want to see.

Keep on pushing and don't let a little pain slow you down. 365 Fit,fit for life.









It's sort of ironic that when the girl from made quit cause she was hurt actually continued after she was injured. Just goes to show you can do anything if you want to.