This is Currents from Black Creek Coaching, a podcast for people who want to stay capable for the life they want to live. I'm Hugh, and our topic this week is are you sore? Are you hurt? Are you just new to this? So most of the people that I talk to that are dealing with some kind of joint or muscle pain will describe a feeling of being disheartened, a feeling of maybe feeling that their body is fragile, and feel like they're scared to exercise, which is all very understandable. And it's common to worry about what kind of pain is normal and what might be an indicator that further exercise will do more harm than good. So I cannot tell you what's happening in your body, and neither can anything else that you listen to or watch or read on the internet. What I'm going to try to do here is give you a sense of what pains or discomforts are ordinary and which ones aren't, and how to tell that it might be time to get seen by somebody. So most of the things that you'll feel that you know that you would describe as pain or discomfort in exercise will fall into like three categories. You might be sore, you might be hurt, or you might just be new to whatever it is you're doing. So the first one, soreness, is the most common. I think almost everybody knows what it feels like to be sore. It goes hand in hand with exercise and it's normal and not really a cause for concern. It shows up late, typically, like one to three days after your exercise session. It typically will be spread like across a whole muscle or a whole part of the body, so you might not be able to like put your finger on one part of your leg and say, this is specifically the part that's sore from my squats. It'll be more like my whole upper leg feels, you know, that kind of dull, achy pain. Um it's worse when you first get up and it tends to ease out as you move around throughout your day. And it will tend to fade, not tend to, it will fade on its own in a couple of days. So soreness is self-resolving. It is not a reliable indicator of the outcome of a training session. So sometimes people will feel like if they don't feel really, really sore after they work out, that it means that they didn't get a good workout in. And that's not a great way to assess the quality of your workout because certain types of exercise tend to promote more soreness than others. So doing like very high repetition training tends to be more like soreness promoting than lower repetition training with higher weights as kind of a rule of thumb. Um, also, when you're doing something new, you tend to be more sore than you are once you get used to whatever that thing is. So if soreness is the only thing that's going on, then it's usually fine just to actually train through it because you can actually feel better by just getting some movement going, getting some blood flowing through those sore parts of the body, and kind of help you get over that feeling of discomfort uh faster than you would if you just sit around. However, if you think that you might be hurt, then that's a time when you want to be more cautious about continuing to exercise. And hurt is the category where it's also maybe a good idea to go and seek professional advice from a medical provider, physical therapist, a physician, something like that. Um so I'm gonna give you some signs that you may be hurt. I don't want you to treat them like a checklist for ruling things out. It's kind of a, it's more of like a list of things to be thinking about as you're uh interrogating the sense of your pain. So a lot of times when we're hurt, uh that will show up due to a specific event. Like you can feel like like a certain rep of your set or like a certain specific action that you took that led to an immediate and sharp pain. Um, you know, it is also possible to do too much in one day, have pain the next day that feels a little bit different than normal soreness. So this isn't a surefire uh metric. Um that kind of injured hurt pain tends to be like sharper, tighter, or like burning. Uh you may be able to put like one finger on it, like as into say the inside of my knee hurts, or you know, versus if you just have a hard day of squatting, your whole leg's gonna hurt um from soreness. So it that that hurt kind of pain um may sit in more in the joint rather than a muscle. It tends not to loosen up or feel better the more you move it. It might either feel the same or worse as you move it, and it might also feel the same or worse as time goes on rather than getting better as time goes on. You may also notice other symptoms like swelling, bruising, numbness, tingling, um, or feeling that like a part of your body might give out if you step on it the wrong way or load it the wrong way. It can also interfere with sleep, and it can change how you go through your day-to-day life. So any one of those reasons is enough to consider seeing a doctor or a physical therapist. As a coach, it's outside my scope of practice or my capability to like diagnose injuries and pathologies. And I would rather somebody spend 40 bucks on a copay than spend six months trying to work around something that they might have been able to get resolved more safely and more quickly with some kind of therapeutic intervention. Um and then frustratingly, it it's possible that you might be hurt and not have really any of the things that I just described on this list. So if you run through that whole list and you don't have any of those feelings that I described, but you're still, you know, in pain of some kind, it doesn't guarantee that it's just like soreness pain. So um the third category here is if you're just new to this, and this is something that people can overlook because a lot of times if folks are new either to exercise or they're new to a certain type of exercise, they might not, they might feel a little self-conscious and they might not want to, you know, be seen to be complaining or or or anything. So they might keep it to themselves and not really, you know, and just kind of sit in that concern silently. So some common things that you might feel when you're new to a type of exercise is like a really intense burning feeling in your muscles uh during the last few reps of a set. Uh that probably isn't a bad thing. That means that you got a good, like uh you did a good job fatiguing the muscle, which is what you're trying to do. You might run out of breath faster than you would have expected to, which can just be an indicator that you're not in as good a shape as you thought you were. Uh you might be walking back to the car and feel like a like a headache coming on or feel your legs shaking. Um, and that can also just be a sign that you exerted yourself quite hard and you know you want to get something to eat and make sure you're hydrated and take it easy for a little while, but isn't necessarily a cause for concern. You might also find that when you're doing a new exercise, muscles that you're not expecting to really be involved start to limit you. Uh and a lot of like are a lot of folks find this with deadlifts when they first start doing deadlifts is you're thinking about your back and your legs, but when you're brand new to it, it tends to be your grip that gives out. And that's because the muscles in your arm that control your hand grip strength and endurance are a lot smaller than the muscles in your legs and your back, so they tend to fatigue more quickly. You also just might feel kind of wobbly or just kind of dumb if you're doing a movement that you've never done before. And that's totally normal. Uh you know, practicing a movement will build confidence and competence in it. So all of those are signs that your body is just unaccustomed to the effort that you're demanding of it. Uh, and they will stop feeling alarming once they stop feeling unfamiliar. Uh so this week, my uh ask, my action step for you is if you do have some kind of pain, uh before you try to decide what it means, you can write down a couple of things in a notebook or make a note on your phone. Number one is when did the pain start? And if there was a specific triggering event, what was it? Number two is can you point to one particular specific spot on your body and say this is the spot that hurts, or is it more like regional, more diffused? And then number three is day over day, is the pain you know better or worse or the same? And a great way to track that is using a one to ten scale for how bad the pain is, which is also something that a medical provider is probably gonna ask you if you go see them. They're gonna say on a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt? And if you already have it written down, then you can kind of track that um uh assessment uh over you know time, that can be a really good indicator uh for the clinician to use. So those three pieces of information are not gonna tell you what the problem is, or if it even if it is a problem, but they can help you track whether it's changing, which is useful. Um so all of this advice I hope that you will use as a way to check in with yourself and to be mindful of the sensations your body's sending you. None of this is like a diagnostic tool. It can't tell you whether you're fine or injured or somewhere in between. Again, I want to emphasize I'm not a medical professional, and even a qualified medical professional can't like give you a self-diagnosis flow chart in a podcast. So if something's worrying you, that's enough reason to have it looked at by someone who can give you a competent professional examination. So you don't need to be brave about your pain, but you also don't need to be scared of it either. You can learn to read it, and part of reading it is just knowing when you've reached the end of what you can do on your own. Every body is different, and there is a lot more to pain than tissue damage and uh nerve signals. There's a whole biopsychosocial model of pain that describes the intersection between our physical, biological self, our psychological, mental self, and the social environment and what we're in and how that we are in, and how all three of those feed into how we perceive pain, um, which is a great topic to look up if you want some some really uh interesting uh scientific reading. So that's the episode. I appreciate you listening. The written version of this is at BlackCreekcoaching.com along with everything else that I've posted. And if you know somebody who's stuck on the same problem, maybe send this episode to them if somebody's uh that you know is in pain and not sure what to do about it. So next week's topic is going to be picking exercises that you'll actually do. And until then, be well.