Hi, is this analogy sound?
If I have a deep cut on my arm (easily defined as an injury), I could rub it, stretch it, scratch it, move the skin in ways that continue to break it open so it wouldn’t heal (or heal much more slowly). Most of us have experienced the pain associated with this type of wound, and the pain of breaking open a partially healed cut. The very visible bleeding is shocking/alarming.
If I have a back-tweak or joint pain from lifting, common wisdom equates the pain to the cut example above. Human nature is to move less so the “injury” will heal faster/better.
However, the evidence says that the pain experienced from these types of sports related, internal, sources cannot be reliably connected to any tissue “injury” (like a cut). The evidence also says that continuing to train, at a level that is comfortable/tolerable doesn’t slow down the healing, can result in faster recovery, and improves your training results.
It’s so ironic that these hidden, internal, biopsychosocial sources of pain defy logic. We have to have faith in a recovery process to help us with something that is experienced like an injury but is hidden from sight.
Thank you
I think “human nature” is the problem. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when I took two semi-feral female cats in my back yard to be spayed. Having a female cat or dog spayed is fairly major surgery. Yet less than twelve hours after the surgery both of them were jumping and running around. The next day both of them scaled the cinder block wall in my back yard and were sitting on top.
A human with a similar surgery probably would want to lay in bed for a couple of days. I doubt that they would be jumping and climbing so soon. Humans try to analyze pain and give it more importance than it deserves. I’m sure animals feel pain too but they don’t let it limit them unnecessarily as they don’t think about it.
I don’t know that the analogy truly holds from the second part of your comparison as it is predicated on rubbing, stretching, etc to a magnitude to break the cut back open. A laceration on your had still allows you to perform a lot of activity subthreshold to what it would take to open the wound. There is a massive difference between moving less and not moving and the less implies an inherent spectrum. Where it falls on the spectrum is individual and injury dependent. I do not think these defy logic by any stretch, but rather adhere firmly to it. In any instance, injured or not, tissue has a tolerance where if stressed beyond, there will be a failure. The problem is, different types of stress can cause injuries to happen differently. Low load cyclical stress tends to elicit tendinopathy change if dosed in too high a volume, High speed, high magnitude strain tends to cause muscle strains if dosed in too high of a volume. I can press my chef’s knife against the back of my hand…to a point. All three are different types of stress and completely contingent upon dose. If any injury results from any of these scenarios, more than anything it closes the range of tolerance. But even to the first two scenarios, it mostly closes the range of tolerance to that type of stress. We can take a tendinopathy and stress it with heavy eccentrics and have positive outcomes, the same goes for a muscle injury. Both of those scenarios dictate a different kind of stress, not a lack of stress.
The problem with common wisdom is that it is typically neither of those things. Common is normally predicated upon the environment and individuals with which ones surrounds themself. What is commonly called “pop” in the Northeastern US is “commonly” called “coke” in the Southeast. The problem is often when one goes to look for advice, what is most easily accessible is rarely wise because there is often an uncertainty associated with wisdom. What may be a common approach in one area, often has no substantiated evidence to support it.