Let’s talk lifestyle and your pain!

Lifestyle

Lifestyle factors such as a lack of physical activity¹, smoking², poor dietary habits (e.g., excess alcohol consumption/processed foods etc.)³, and poor sleep (quality and/or quantity)⁴ can contribute to your pain experience and make it worse. 

Ol’ mate livin’ his best life

General lifestyle factors

Some questions to reflect on: 

1. Do you think you do enough physical activity?
2. Are you sleeping well? Do you get 7-9hrs/night? Does your pain affect your sleep? 
3. Are you overweight? Do you think this is contributing to your pain? 
4. How much do you smoke and/or drink? 

Implications regarding a contribution from lifestyle factors include, 

1. Higher risk of pain with over- and under-active individuals⁵
2. Higher risk of pain in any region with smoking 
3. Research shows exercise has a positive effect on pain and mood (termed neurophysiological modulation)
4. Healthy diet has a myriad of health benefits including bone and joint health (e.g., reduced risk of arthritis, osteoporosis etc.)

If sitting’s the new smoking, this person must have moments left to live! Perhaps the situation could only be worse if they were in fact sitting on 1000 burning cigarettes!

Sports-specific factors 

Doing too little can make you an avoidance coper, and doing too much can make you an endurance coper. In my experience, most athletes err on endurance coping as they continue training with inappropriate amounts of pain. Recognising where you fall on this continuum is helpful as you can tailor your approach to rehab appropriately. 

Avoidance and endurance copers. 

Implications for endurance copers include,

1. Gradually doing less!
2. Confront false beliefs (e.g., no pain no gain)

Implications for avoidance copers include,

1. Gradually doing more! 
2. Challenge fears and and confront false beliefs (e.g., fear pain, hurt = harm, etc.)

Avoidance copers: you can poke the bear a little bit! Endurance copers: don’t poke the shit out of it and piss it off! 

Some questions to reflect on:

1. How much impact does your training have on your pain (during training and afterwards [the following 24-48hrs])? 
2. What parts of your training are the most provocative (e.g., live sparring vs drilling, grappling vs striking etc.)
3. Do you have any cross-training options?

References:

1. Heneweer et al., 2009; Lin et al., 2011 ↩︎
2. Ditre et al., 2011 ↩︎
3. Dean et al., 2015; Wintermeyer et al., 2016 ↩︎
4. Finan et al., 2013; Davies et al., 2008 ↩︎
5. Smuck et al., 2020 ↩︎