What To Do If Something Hurts While You're Training
If something suddenly hurts while you're training, there are normally two reactions.
The first is to ignore it and carry on.
The second is to stop the workout completely and assume you need to see a physio.
Neither is particularly helpful as a blanket rule.
I've worked as a personal trainer for more than 14 years and delivered over 13,000 PT sessions. Aches, pains and occasional injuries are inevitably part of working with people for that long.
Diagnosing every pain that appears in the gym isn't my job. Sure, there are common answers to common problems that I can help with, but the main thing is knowing how to respond sensibly when something doesn't feel right.
Here's how I approach it.
First: how did the pain happen?
The first thing I want to know is what somebody was doing when the pain appeared.
There is a significant difference between something hurting during a genuinely hard effort and something starting to hurt during an otherwise innocuous exercise.
If you're sprinting, jumping, lifting something very heavy or really pushing yourself and suddenly feel a sharp pain, we should be more cautious.
You may have strained or injured something, so in that case we'll stop the movement and see how it settles.
If it feels normal again relatively quickly, your eventual return to that exercise should normally be more conservative: lower load, slower movement and considerably more control.
If the pain persists, gets worse or affects normal movement outside the gym, that's the point at which getting it assessed becomes more useful.
But that's not actually how most pains appear during my PT sessions. More commonly, we'll be doing an exercise they've done plenty of times before and they'll suddenly say:
“My shoulder feels a bit funny today.”
Or:
“I can feel something in my knee.”
There hasn't been a dramatic injury. Nothing has snapped. We weren't attempting a one-rep max.
Something just doesn't feel right.
That's when I start modifying rather than panicking.
Stop doing the thing that hurts
This sounds obvious, but people are surprisingly bad at it.
An exercise hurts, so they do another repetition to check.
It still hurts.
They rest for 30 seconds and try it again.
Still hurts.
Then perhaps they change their foot position slightly and test it for a fourth time.
You don't need to keep irritating something to confirm that it is irritated.
If a movement suddenly produces pain that wasn't there before, stop doing that version of the movement for a moment.
Reduce the load
The simplest adjustment is often just to make the exercise easier.
If you're squatting with 80kg and something doesn't feel right, see what happens with considerably less weight.
Pain isn't always an on/off switch where an exercise is either completely safe or completely unsuitable.
Sometimes the amount of force you're asking your body to produce is simply more than it is comfortable tolerating that day.
If reducing the load removes the problem, you may be able to continue training at that level.
You don't have to train to the limit to get stronger, and you're not going to lose your progress because one workout was lighter than planned.
Slow the movement down
This is the best tip of them all.
Reducing speed, particularly when you're lowering the weight, makes it easier for you to take control of the movement.
Instead of dropping quickly into a squat, lowering a weight without much control or using momentum to complete a repetition, slow everything down.
Quite often a movement that feels uncomfortable when performed quickly feels absolutely fine when performed under control.
It also tells you something useful.
If you can perform the same basic movement slowly, with a lighter load and good control without pain, you have considerably more options than if every version of that movement hurts.
Change the range of movement
You can also experiment with range.
Perhaps the first three quarters of a squat feel completely normal but the very bottom position hurts your knee.
You don't necessarily need to decide there and then exactly why.
You can simply avoid the painful range.
The same principle can apply to pressing, pulling and plenty of other movements.
Again, the objective isn't to find a clever way of forcing yourself through pain.
It's to find out whether there is a comfortable version of the movement you can still perform.
Try a different variation
Sometimes changing the exercise slightly is enough.
A particular pressing exercise may hurt your shoulder while another feels completely normal. A barbell movement may be uncomfortable while a machine gives you no trouble at all.
And that works both ways, on one day you might benefit from a variation that provides more stability, and on another day it might be you need more freedom of movement.
Isometrics can sometimes be useful
Another option I sometimes use is an isometric exercise.
An isometric means producing muscular force without actually moving through a range of motion.
A common example is a wall sit.
If the movement itself is what feels uncomfortable, removing the movement can sometimes give you a way to load the muscles without producing the same irritation.
It's particularly useful if you've been resting something for a while, and you're trying to reintroduce your body to a little bit of training load, without irritating it further.
You can train something else
This is one of the biggest things I have to remind people.
You can just do something else.
In my experience, there are very few (if any) injuries that mean you legitimately can't still get something out of going to the gym.
If you can make it to the gym, you can do something productive..
There is often a temptation to stop everything until the injury is completely gone.
Depending on the injury and the advice you've been given, it may make much more sense to leave the affected area alone while continuing to train everything else.
I subscribe to the school of thought that both physically and psychologically it's beneficial to keep active, even if you do have something that hurts.
Just train around it, and you preserve your routine, strength and fitness without continually interfering with something that needs time to recover.
What if you already know you're injured?
This is slightly different.
If you have a known injury, particularly one that has been assessed by a physio, I don't think the gym is the place to start experimenting with your own diagnosis.
Follow the advice you've been given.
I've worked with physios throughout my career, and I think the best results come when the physio and personal trainer complement one another rather than trying to do the same job.
A good physio can assess the injury, establish what we're dealing with and give us useful parameters for rehabilitation.
My job is then to turn that information into an actual bout of exercise rather than a rehab session.
Working with a physio doesn't mean stopping the gym
This is where I think people can sometimes fall into a gap.
You see a physio.
They assess your injury and perhaps give you several rehabilitation exercises.
That's useful, but you may still be left wondering:
Can I train tomorrow?
Can I still squat?
What happens to my upper-body training?
How heavy should I go?
When can I start adding weight again?
How does the rehabilitation fit into the programme I was already doing?
Those are training questions.
When I'm working with a client who is also seeing a physio, I want to understand what the physio has found, what they want us to avoid and what they actually want us to build.
I can then modify the rest of the programme around that advice.
Sometimes that means temporarily removing an exercise.
Sometimes it means reducing load or range.
Sometimes it means incorporating the rehabilitation into the warm-up or training programme.
And sometimes it simply means leaving the injured area alone while we train everything else.
You don't need your physio and your PT competing to solve the same problem.
You want them doing different jobs towards the same outcome.
When should you stop training and get something assessed?
There obviously comes a point where modifying an exercise yourself isn't appropriate.
If you've had a significant accident or trauma, have severe or rapidly worsening pain, substantial swelling, an obvious change in shape, numbness or persistent pins and needles, or you can't properly use the affected limb or put weight through it, seek appropriate medical advice.
I'd also recommend getting something assessed if a less dramatic problem simply isn't going away.
If your shoulder has felt uncomfortable every time you press for the last month, constantly finding a slightly different exercise isn't really solving anything.
Likewise, if the same pain keeps disappearing and returning whenever you increase your training, it's worth finding out what is going on.
I'm very happy to train around a problem.
I'm less interested in helping somebody ignore one indefinitely.
Don't panic, but don't ignore it either
If something hurts while you're training, you don't always need to choose between pushing through it and going home.
Start with the simplest options.
Stop doing the thing that hurts.
Reduce the load.
Slow the movement down.
Change the range.
Try another variation.
Use an isometric where appropriate.
Or simply train something else.
Then pay attention to what happens afterwards.
You don't need to diagnose every unexpected pain to make a sensible decision about your next exercise.
And if the problem doesn't settle, keeps returning or looks more like a genuine injury, that's when getting a good physiotherapist involved becomes valuable.
The objective isn't to prove that you can train through anything.
It's to keep training productively without turning a small problem into a bigger one.
If you're looking for personal training in Kentish Town and want someone who can help you get stronger while working around old injuries, aches and the occasional niggle, that's a normal part of what I do with clients every day.
