Pain that interrupts sleep

Hi -

I have a few nagging aches and pains that I just ignore and train through. However, as I’m getting to, or am at, the end of my current training block, I’m finding that pain that doesn’t bother me that much during waking hours, is interrupting my sleep. Or that is to say, I wake up in the night and at the same time am experiencing pain (those two may not be related), but the pain brings me “fully” awake, and makes it difficult to get back to sleep.

Are there any strategies out there I could use to address this issue when it starts creeping up for multiple nights a week?

Thanks for your time.

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Hey @Neal_Starbird what are you experiencing and where? How long has this been going on?

Regarding strategies - this is likely going to be a discussion of modifying loading and fatigue management to accommodate symptoms rather than ignoring things.

Somewhere in my left Quad. When the pain wakes me up it feels like it could be anywhere from my left glute to the lower-outside of my left quad.

I’d spoken with @Derek_Miles about this issue by e-mail back in November, when it was preventing me from being able to train, and instituted some load and fatigue management strategies following that discussion. Those worked great for allowing it to all but disappear, and training was able to continue. It’s only been during this most recent dev block that it started getting cranky again sometimes, but I found that tempo BW squats could clear it up for training. And sometimes I woke up in the morning in pain, and tempo squats would again seem to “fix” it. Towards the end of the block, however, it started interrupting sleep on multipe (sometimes consecutive) evenings.

Possibly of interest, I started a pivot block yesterday, and wanted to throw in some single leg squatting movement. I had planned to do front racked BB reverse lunges, but the left quad rebelled hard on the first rep with the empty bar. I switched to front racked BB step-ups to a high-box, and was able to do those, but the quad was still grumpy across all reps and sets, so I just stayed with the empty bar. In that context, the pain seemed to track from the front of the left-side of the hip, straight down the “top” of the quad to about 4 inches above the knee.

Hey Neal, can you elaborate on what you mean by your quad rebelling and feeling grumpy?

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Sorry for being so vague. When I tried to do a reverse lunge, stepping back with the left leg, there was a sharp pain in the left quad almost immediately. The pain subsided fairly quickly, but came back a little bit during the reps on step-ups.