Welcome to the Upright Health Podcast. In today's episode, we're going to talk about a question I get from students of my programs all the time, and it's something that I have asked myself a million times. The question is, how long do I have to keep doing exercise to be cured of my pain? So this is applicable whether it's hip pain, back pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, ankle pain, foot pain, elbow pain, wrist pain, hand pain. if you have taken the exercise approach and you're going to believe what I believe, which is that exercise can actually get rid of your pain and keep it away, you probably are hoping that there is some set amount of exercise that you need to do that will remove the pain forever. That is the ideal situation, when medical researchers look at things like back pain or hip pain, they often use this kind of metric to determine whether or not exercise is an effective intervention for your pain. And a lot of times what I've seen in various studies is, you know, exercise is good only for a short time and then the pain comes back. Or I'll see summaries that say something like exercise is not that effective because the pain comes back. And so I want to address a big trap here, a mental error that we all make when we think about exercise as an intervention for chronic pain. And once you understand this, you will understand what you're really facing when you're trying to fix pain. And this is going to require you to shift your perspective a little bit. So I have a couple analogies that I think are going to be really useful for helping you shift your perspective so you understand how long you really actually have to exercise to be cured of whatever aches and pains you have. Before we get into that, there are two things I want to talk about first is if you haven't already, I want to invite you to subscribe wherever you're listening. And also, if you haven't gotten my free program, The Body Rebuilding Basics, on my website, please go check it out. It's at uprighthealth.com slash BRB. The Body Rebuilding Basics program has tutorials. It has discussions. It's got strategies to help you sleep better, to help you focus better, and it's got free follow along workouts that you can use to improve your posture, to improve your shoulder function, to improve your hips, to improve basically everything about your body from head to toe. It's all free and it's at uprighthealth.com slash BRB. So go check it out. The second thing I want to mention is everything that I'm going to talk about here is based on experience. If you are new here and you've never heard me detail the long list of things that I've had go wrong with my body. Suffice it to say, I've had pretty much every joint in my body hurt a lot. At the time of recording today, I'm actually nursing a bit of a back tweak because I was doing a bunch of cartwheels and cartwheel variations, and I overextended my spine. I wasn't using my glutes enough. I had a couple of hip things that I was neglecting and I paid the price while doing an hour's worth of cartwheels. The point here is I have a lot of experience with aches and pains and I've been, you know, fixing my own body for at this point, that's a long time, two decades, basically of really trying to figure out how the human body works and then working with people who have their own issues. And then I've been professionally helping people for probably, what is it, 15 years now? I don't know, 2007? You do the math. Anyway, the two analogies I want to share with you will help you understand here's how pain really works. So first, I want you to think of your body like a bank account. If you're in pain or limited in movement right now, consider yourself in a physical debt. To get out of that debt, you need to make consistent deposits. Those deposits are basically comprised of time, energy, and effort, meaning exercise. And at first, making these deposits feels really challenging. it feels big, it feels like, oh man, I don't know if I can do this. But once you start to get some momentum, once you start really paying down that debt, and you start to move well, you will notice that it takes less work, less effort, fewer deposits to maintain that freedom and comfort. you will not be stuck doing tons of exercises forever just to stay out of debt, right? Because you're adding deposits. Yes, you might be making withdrawals, right? You make withdrawals from your daily activities, whether you're sitting on your butt all day or you're doing a hardcore heavy exercise four times a week. You do make withdrawals, but the more you've been regularly making deposits, the more of a buffer you have against going into debt. So consider yourself, when you're in constant chronic or recurring pain, consider yourself in debt. And once you've done enough, you will start to notice, oh, I don't get in pain so quickly because I have this buffer. You've got some savings stacked up. So, from this perspective, you can see that exercise isn't actually curing you, but that also means that pain is also not a disease. And I want you to think about that for a second, because often people think, oh, pain is like a disease that I need to get rid of. And so if you're going to treat this pain, if I'm going to try to fix my pain, I'm going to try to do something that makes this pain go away forever. And realistically, as you'll see in this next analogy, that is not a reasonable goal at all. Because if you manage to get rid of pain forever, you are interfering with a very important function, a very, very important feedback mechanism that your body uses to help you help yourself. So let's look at this next analogy. I want you to think about your pain like hunger. You wouldn't expect to eat one big meal every few months and feel great, right? You wouldn't expect to be able to eat one gigantic, huge, enormous meal tonight and then never have to eat ever again. You had lunch today probably or yesterday, whatever time you're listening to this. You had lunch recently, and you probably also had dinner, and then maybe breakfast, or maybe you just had coffee to suppress your hunger. But every four to six hours, you're hungry. You're feeling this sensation in your stomach, and it's telling you, oh, gosh, something's not right. I've got to get some food. Does that mean that any of those meals was not a good meal and was not an important meal? so hunger is the signal to you that your body is looking for some sort of nourishment hunger is telling you hey we need some fuel let's get some fuel in here so we can maintain this body so this body can work well so we can do what we need to do pain in your body it works pretty much the same way muscles need nourishment they need consistent challenge and activity your bones need that nourishment they need loading they need to be put into positions that make them do things if you starve your muscles and bones of movement what happens you start to feel aching. You start to feel things just begging for your attention. You feel pinching. You feel jamming. You notice certain movements don't feel so good. This is very similar to your stomach hurting if you skipped eating for a few days. In other words, movements, some sort of exertion in a nourishing way is important for your muscles and your bones. I mean, it's important for your heart too. It's important for your lungs, right? Movement challenge, physical challenge is important to the whole body. And if you try to ignore that, your body is going to talk to you louder and louder and louder until it eventually gets your attention. Going back to what I mentioned earlier with my back, I had already noticed leading up to the day I actually hurt my back that I had I was experiencing some stiffness in my hips and my hip muscles were not allowing proper full range of motion. And I was kind of paying attention to it. I was stretching things out, but I wasn't really trying to get to the bottom of it, really suss out what was going on. And I just wanted to do the fun stuff. I wanted to do that stuff that's more exciting, feels cool. And in some ways it felt totally fine. But I was ignoring some signals. They weren't super loud signals. They were range of motion signals to me. Like, okay, I can't quite flex my hips as much as I want to. And I just said, whatever, I'll ignore it. It's fine. It's not a big deal. So I was basically going into debt with some of my hip muscles. And then when I went to do a bunch of cartwheels for an hour, I ended up constantly having to compensate. Not noticing it because, you know, it's a fast-ish motion with a lot of things going on. So I wasn't noticing how I was compensating. And it worked until it didn't. Right. And until my back muscles said, hey, you have way overdone this. We cannot keep doing this. So you need to stop. and in this recovery period, I'm probably about five or six days into the recovery period, I was forced to pay attention to the areas that hurt, forced to pay attention to the relationship of my hip muscles and my back muscles, and forced to say, okay, all right, okay, I get it. Those muscles that were trying to get my attention before the cartwheels, well, now they really need to have the attention, otherwise I'm not going to be able to walk. So the point here is that the sensations you get, the discomfort you get, is a sign to you that you're not nourishing muscles and bones in the way they need to be. it can start off subtly, meaning range of motion, loss, a little bit of aching, you know, little bits of discomfort and pain here and there. And then it can get a lot louder when you just end up with something really, really hurting to the point where you feel like you're horribly broken and there's nothing you can do. You just need somebody to give you a quick fix. And that's where things get dangerous, right? Because ultimately there's no magic pill, there's no magic surgery generally that just replaces your body's basic need for movement. A lot of people get seduced by this idea that, oh yeah, this surgery can, it'll just fix everything. It'll just fix everything. And I think there are some times where a surgery may end up being maybe the only option because things have gotten so bad. But I think a lot of people skip the step of looking at what they're doing to contribute to the problem. If you are ignoring your signals, if you are never learning to listen to the signals, if you're never exploring what your body can do, you never give it the challenges that it needs to be healthy, a quick fix isn't actually going to fix anything because you will end up driving the problem somewhere else. And I've seen countless stories over my career, YouTube comments, emails, people telling me this exact story, right? Oh, I had a back problem, so I had back surgery, and then the back got better for a year, but then the back pain came back, and then my hips started hurting, and then I got hip surgery. And then I got, right, and then my knee went out, and then I got knee surgery, and now I'm not allowed to walk, run, or jump, or do anything. So if you are in pain and you're thinking, I'm going to use exercise to get myself out of this pain, then remember that you are not looking for a solution that removes pain forever. Pain is a signal to you that something is going a little off course. If you're sitting on your butt for 16 hours a day and your butt hurts, it might be a sign it's time to actually use your butt muscles and get up out of that chair. same if you have back pain sitting in a chair same if you have back pain from standing all day same if you feel like your shoulders and your hips and your knees don't like lifting weights five or six days a week same if your body tells you hey maybe we shouldn't be stretching this much every single day, right? That one's for all you yogis out there who are super bendy and flexible and continuously pushing the limits of your flexibility without training strength, right? You want to listen to your body and start figuring out how to balance things out because just flexibility or just strength or just endurance, if you try to hammer just one of these things, it's not going to be good. right your body needs to have a balance of inputs so that your body can feel good so how long do you have to keep doing exercise to be cured the answer is you won't ever be cured of pain pain is always going to be there as a helper for you it's going to help you learn stuff it's going to help you navigate and it's going to help you continue to move through life in a way that is healthy for your body. But yes, of course, the actual experience of pain sucks. It definitely makes it difficult to think clearly. It makes it hard to be calm. But if you take breaths, you go slow, you start playing around and experimenting. Things do get better and then your life does get better. So I hope these analogies help you understand this difficult and sometimes confusing topic. And if you have comments about it, then feel free to leave them somewhere, wherever you're listening to this. Make sure you subscribe and leave a positive review, I hope, wherever you're listening. And make sure you check me out on YouTube at Upright Health and subscribe on Upright Health. And if you haven't already, please go to the Body Rebuilding Basics. Sign up. It's free. UprightHealth.com slash BRB. Your body will thank you. I promise. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, I hope you remember that pain sucks. Life shouldn't.
