“Regular exercise may alter how a person experiences pain, according to a new study. The longer we continue to work out, the new findings suggest, the greater our tolerance for discomfort can grow. …
In the study, those who exercised “displayed substantially greater ability to withstand pain. Their pain thresholds had not changed; they began to feel pain at the same point they had before. But their tolerance had risen. … Those volunteers whose fitness had increased the most also showed the greatest increase in pain tolerance.
“’To me,’ said Matthew Jones, a researcher at the University of New South Wales who led the study, the results ‘suggest that the participants who exercised had become more stoical and perhaps did not find the pain as threatening after exercise training, even though it still hurt as much,’ an idea that fits with entrenched, anecdotal beliefs about the physical fortitude of athletes. …
“The study’s implications are considerable, Mr. Jones says. Most obviously, he said, the results remind us that the longer we stick with an exercise program, the less physically discomfiting it will feel, even if we increase our efforts, as did the cyclists here. The brain begins to accept that we are tougher than it had thought, and it allows us to continue longer although the pain itself has not lessened.
“The study also could be meaningful for people struggling with chronic pain …. [T]he experiment suggests that moderate amounts of exercise can change people’s perception of their pain and help them, he said, ‘to be able to better perform activities of daily living.’”
Read the whole story in the New York Times