My Journey With Health And Fitness – Knowing The Difference – Muscle Fatigue, Discomfort And Pain

I did my usual walk then Zoom fitness class this morning. As I finished I noted a lot of thunder happening so looked outside. I said to my husband, hmm, I think we will skip our morning walk. Within about 2 minutes the skies had opened up and it started pouring rain.  I checked my weather app to find that tomorrow we are going to get a serious storm.  I decided I might as well acknowledge there will be little chance of me doing a long walk in the morning.  Instead I will find a recorded course from my fitness centre, probably one involving cardio and will throw that into the mix tomorrow.

Today was a mobility and strength class with an instructor who doesn’t know me well (I’ve only taken 1 in-person class with her) and so she doesn’t know that I have some limitations.  The first exercise she had us do was to do bicep curls while lifting up onto your toes.  I tried a couple of these and realized that going up on my toes was causing pain in my ankle.  I opted not to try that again right now.  There were several other exercises where we were to do similar moves just varying the arm exercises so I stuck with just doing the weights.

Sometimes there seems to be a fine line between muscle fatigue, discomfort and pain.  One of my instructors reminds us all the time that the burn we feel is our muscles becoming fatigued which will help them grow stronger as they recover.  I can also assure you that sometimes I also feel more discomfort such as when I am stretching muscles in a new way and you feel the muscle pulling (note by that I mean you really feel the stretch of the muscle).  But these are ok, they can be a real sign of improvement.

Pain, is not ok.  I cringe when I hear that you have to work through the pain, no you do not.  Pain is an indication of potential injury.  I remember when I first started at the fitness centre and I was bound and determined to push myself.  That meant I would do exercises that involved kneeling even though the scar tissue and arthritis make doing that very uncomfortable.  After trying that a few times I had so much pain in my knee that I could barely walk.  And look at my ankle, I knew I often had pain but it took me months to finally get to the point to have it looked at only to learn I had a serious injury.

So know the difference between fatigue, discomfort and pain.  Know what is ok to ‘work through’ and what isn’t.  And seriously, if something causes you actual pain, step back and determine why.