Treatment Table Podcast

Mini Consult | When Should You Push Through Pain?

• Mathew Ah Chow • Season 1 • Episode 15

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0:00 | 6:01

Should you push through pain during exercise — or is your body telling you to stop?

In this episode of The Treatment Table: Mini Consults, physiotherapist Matthew Ah Chow breaks down how to tell the difference between normal muscle soreness, injury pain, and fatigue that could be warning you to slow down.

If you’ve ever wondered:

  • “Is this pain normal?”
  • “Am I injured or just sore?”
  • “Should I train or rest today?”
  • “Why do I feel exhausted even after exercising?”

…this episode is for you.

Mathew explains:

  • The difference between good pain vs bad pain
  • DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) vs injury
  • When to stop exercising immediately
  • Signs your nervous system and body need recovery
  • How to safely return to movement without making pain worse

These short physiotherapy Q&A episodes are designed to give you practical, evidence-based health and fitness advice to help you move better, recover faster, and stay active long term.

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SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Trip and Temple Podcast. This is a little bit different. We are in between seasons at the moment. And so what I want to do is bring you a mini consult series. This is where we're going to take one question, one topic, or one clinical tip. Then I'm just going to break it down into one easy takeaway. I'm your host, Dr. Physiotherapy Matthew Achau. So let's get into it. So we had a bunch of questions come in. Thank you very much for sending through your questions. If you have any more questions, please make sure you send through. You can DM me on our Instagram account, Treatment Table Podcast, or send through an email to treatmenttablepodcast at gmail.com. Hey Renew, you've got the questions. Hit me.

SPEAKER_00

Alright, so our first question is from Naomi, and she says, How do you tell the difference between pain you need to work through versus pain you need to listen to?

SPEAKER_01

Great question. So remember, pain is a signal coming from our body, from our tissues, whether it be our muscles, our joints, our ligaments, our tendons, and it is a signal to our brain. Now it is up to you how you decipher and how you decode what that signal means. Now, generally, our first response is to stop what we're doing. And sometimes we tend to ignore it if it's not that bad. So it's how do you figure out what is really bad pain and what is good pain? So a general good rule is if it's a mild pain, you still can move through that pain. It's comfortable enough that it doesn't get worse, then that's okay. You're still good to exercise. Ideally, you want to try and warm up, do some mobility, do some trigger balls, have a look at our previous exercises on how to do that. Try that first. It should improve and it should warm up. Now, where you need to stop, this is if it doesn't improve. If it gets worse when you try and warm up, maybe you've tried to do some mobility, you've tried to do some trigger balls, it's getting worse. If you're getting pins and needles, numbness, definitely stop. If the pain is sharp and radiating to other areas, definitely stop. One of the other big red flags that we ask is if you're getting pain at nighttime and you're waking up with pain and you're waking up in the morning very stiff and sore and it's taking a long time, I would not be pushing through that. Now, if you've just done a new workout or if you've gone really hard with a workout, how do you know if that's just what we call post-exercise soreness or delayed onset muscle soreness called DOMS, or is it something that you've done damage to? So again, with DOMS or delayed onset muscle soreness, this is gonna warm up. Generally, it's the muscles you've just worked up. So it's both sides of your body, it's not one side, it's not limited to one area. If it's one area and it's sharp, that's probably a bit of a warning sign. Hey Renel, we've got the next question from Naomi. Do you want to read it through?

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so Naomi's second question is how do you tell the difference between fatigue that will feel better with moving or working out, and fatigue that means your body really needs to rest?

SPEAKER_01

Thank you, Naomi. Another really good question, and one that I also get a lot of. And so this is more around fatigue. Might not necessarily be pain, but remember there's two types of fatigue that I generally talk about. One of them is just your muscles, right? You've you've had a really big workout, you've been doing, say you're a runner, you've been doing lots of K's, you're gonna feel sore, your muscles are gonna be pretty sore. One of the other ones is what we call central fatigue. This is around your nervous system. If you're just feeling really, really flat, you're exhausted, it's hard, you've really got to motivate yourself to get out of bed, to get into the gym, that's another type of fatigue. Now, how do you know whether you should push through that or do you need to listen to your body and rest? Very similar to what I said before. Once you feel like you're warming up and you're moving better, you should start to feel the energy improve. If after 10 minutes you've done a bit of warm-up, you've done some mobility, and you're still like, This sucks, I don't want to be here. What I like to do in those moments is just cut the session short. Do another 10-15 minutes of something lighter, less intensity, because we know that if you're either really fatigued in your nervous system or in your muscles, you're likely to re-injure yourself. So it's still better to do something active recovery, jump on the bike, jump on the rower, go at a lower intensity, get your cardio in, or do some lighter activation work, and then have a rest, go home, make sure you feel yourself, get some good sleep, try again tomorrow. Thank you, Naomi, for your amazing questions. I get this a lot in the clinic. So, what I want you to take away from this quick mini console is that you need to try and get your body moving first. 10 minutes, do some mobility, do some foam rolling, do some light warm-up, and see if it feels better. Your energy should improve, your body should feel better, it should be ready to go. If it's not, that's when you need to start to listen, break it down, have a bit of a rest, come back again tomorrow. So it's really learn to listen to your body. And that's a wrap for our first mini consult series. Thank you so much, Naomi, for sending through your questions. We'll answer some more questions next week. If you have a question, send through a DM on our Instagram accounts, Treatment Table Podcast, or send us an email at treatmenttablepodcast at gmail.com. You can even send us a voice note and we'll play it on the podcast. We'll see you next week on the treatment table.