Episode 7: Understanding Your Body's Signals: Navigating Soreness, Pain, and Injury During Exercise

We explore the crucial differences between soreness, pain, and injury during exercise, helping you understand when to push forward and when to pull back. Training smart means learning to interpret your body's signals correctly so you can make progress without unnecessary setbacks.

• Strength training is extremely safe when done correctly under professional guidance
• Good soreness typically feels like a burning sensation in the muscle belly that dissipates after exercise
• Warning signs include sharp pain, tingling, persistent discomfort, swelling, or pain near joints
• Small positioning adjustments during exercises can often resolve joint discomfort
• Soreness should gradually improve over days, not worsen or persist long-term
• Working with professionals ensures appropriate exercise selection and progression
• Your starting point, injury history, and daily condition all affect how you should train
• The body communicates through sensations – learning to interpret them is essential
• Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to feel sore after every workout to make progress

If you need help or guidance with your fitness journey, reach out to us at Spiraling Fist Fitness.

Transcript

Introduction to Injuries and Training

Speaker 1 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to episode 7 of the 1% Better podcast with your host, josh Williams. So looking forward to being here today and talking to you all. Today's topic I wanted to talk about is injuries, so this is an important thing to understand. So, more importantly, what is soreness, pain, injury, how to know the difference and how to train smart? So commonly, when people are starting with us, they're typically coming with an injury.

Distinguishing Good Soreness from Warning Signs

Speaker 1 0:33

Injuries can happen because they happened all at once, so you fell and hurt something. The reasons why leading up to that can be numerous. It could be a lack of balance, lack of strength, lack of bone density, could have been a freak accident. There's so many different things that go into an actual injury and the thing is is when people come in, they know there's a benefit of getting stronger, there's a benefit of increasing strength, increasing bone density, moving well. As we increase movement, we'll maintain that range of movement. Lack of movement creates stiffness, weakness and create inflammation, and so there's this kind of balance between I want to get started, because I know movement and strength training is going to be beneficial to me, but I don't want to feel worse than I'm feeling now to me, but I don't want to feel worse than I'm feeling now. Or, hey, I'm feeling pretty good. I know I could be stronger, but I don't want to get injured. And, being upfront, strength training is extremely safe when done correctly, underneath the guidance of a trained professional. And it's probably another topic for another day when we talk about people going out on their own, where they end up going too hard, too fast and injuring themselves or doing too little and not getting the benefit of the actual exercise.

Speaker 1 1:59

Is good soreness? What are good signs? What are warning signs that we need to pay attention to and understanding that these feelings that we're feeling are all coming from the body, letting us know where we are in space. What is the body feeling? What is it going through? Is it good? Is it not good? Is it a sign that's coming from a history of pain or a history of when I do this? This happens.

Speaker 1 2:24

It's complex, but there's a couple of things to keep in mind. So, if you are starting to work out and you are feeling a soreness or a hot sensation, that is in the muscle, so I call it the muscle belly. So, if you take, for example, between your knee joint and your hip, if there is some soreness while you're working the lower body in the middle of that thigh and then it goes away once you stop working out. That is okay. That happens as blood goes into the muscle, it creates soreness, can build up lack of that lactic acid and then, once you stop, the body is able to clear the blood or clear the lactic acid and then it goes away. That is completely normal. That burning sensation like so Now.

How to Adjust and Listen to Your Body

Speaker 1 3:14

So there is other times where we might feel something and it doesn't feel bad and then it shows up a couple days later. You know we want to be mindful of that. But other things instances like again, typically sharp, you know, pointing pain, like I can feel it in a spot or closer towards the joint, or you know where the muscle meets the bone is typically something we want to watch out for. So hot burning sensations, tingling, are typically not things we want to be dealing with Now. If there is discomfort in a joint, can we reposition? So if we're doing a press or a squat, making small tweaks to the positioning of your foot or your hands, can we just get it in a different spot that allows more space within that joint to move and decreases whether that's discomfort or the feeling or sensation that you're feeling. So you want to take these as signs and listen to them, because oftentimes a small tweak will allow us to enjoy that range of motion, be able to build strength with that movement exercise as well.

Speaker 1 4:25

Now, if we try a bunch of different things, it's still not feeling right. You know, it could be just that day, or it could be something we want to take note of long term, saying maybe this isn't the best movement to get the outcome that we want to get. And that's why previous episode, you know I talked about, you know, keeping the main thing. The main thing it's always where are we trying to get to? Do we have to use this exact thing? No, we can use something different where the body allows.

Speaker 1 4:50

Some other signs we want to watch out for is swelling or warming. You know snaps and pops aren't always bad, but we definitely want to be aware of those feelings as well. And so typically, again with soreness, you might have heard a lot of like oh I need to be sore to get a good workout, and the truth is no, when you're doing something new, there is an expected level of soreness, meaning from the muscle, and stiffness as the body's adapting to it. It shouldn't be anything crazy. If it is, it's probably we did too much and we got to do a little bit less. It was too much for the body to adapt to, and so we want to keep mindful of that.

Speaker 1 5:31

Now, if it's a soreness that persists longer than a couple of days or continues to gradually get worse, that is a red flag that we want to get that checked out. We want to go to a primary doctor or go to a physical therapist for a consult and to look into that. Typically, if it's muscle soreness, you're going to see a gradual getting better and better and better as we go through. Again, swelling is typically not a great sign as well. It doesn't mean you do anything crazy. Swelling is just a way of the body to do some healing, stabilization of that area as well, and that's why we work with, you know, at Spiraling, a network of professional individuals, whether that's doctors, primarily also physical therapists as well.

Speaker 1 6:12

And then there is the case where, when you're coming in, you know we meet with each person individually and kind of knowing where they're at, where their injury's at. You know how does that feel on a day-to-day basis. For example, if someone has a shoulder discomfort, you know, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being excruciating and one being really nothing. They might constantly live in a three or four, and so when we're coming in they're going to always have shoulder soreness. But we want to be mindful. Is it making it worse? Has that discomfort gone up throughout the workout? Has it stayed the same? Ideally it's decreased with some proper movement. So we want to be mindful of that and so we never. The workout should not be making or exacerbating that feeling Throughout it. If anything, it should keep it the same or, ideally, bring it down a level.

Working with Professionals on Injury Management

Speaker 1 7:01

And you know a couple of things that are important that a coach is going to take in to consideration. Is you know where are you starting at? So when we meet with each client, we're going to go through a movement assessment. We're going to get your injury history. What's going on? How are you feeling on a day-to-day basis? And then how do you move? How does your body look like when it's going on? How are you feeling on a day-to-day basis and then how do you move? How does your body look like when it's moving? How does it feel when it's moving? And then the next step we'll actually do is. You know, how does it feel, look and respond when we start loading the body, because each person we can move at a different rate, do different things with, depending on these factors. Then the other thing we're going to take into consideration is also that daily, so in a general sense, we might feel this way, but on a specific day, we might feel a certain way where maybe one area is tired, maybe we did something out of the norm on the weekend, we were moving our kids into college, and so we want to take account of that for our body. And what we're doing throughout that, as coaches, is taking that information where are you trying to get to? And then giving you the right dosage of exercises, the right movements of exercises and loading parameters to get you to where you want to get to.

Speaker 1 8:08

Our clients are primarily looking to get stronger, move better, more stamina, and doing it at the pace that your body can do that while keeping you healthy, while getting all the benefits of it. And again, that comes back to a lot of progression. A lot of times we will, you know, a day we feel really great, we'll push too hard and then we feel not great or we don't listen to the signs of our body and then we do tweak something because maybe we were sacrificing form or weight, or the reverse end is frustrating. We spent all this time in the gym but we haven't seen the progress because we weren't pushing enough, because we didn't have the confidence to know how to push safely, and so those are all the things that we're working on.

Key Takeaways for Safe Training

Speaker 1 8:50

When I'm working with a client or they come in to work with us is again where are you at? Where are you trying to get to what injuries? Do I need to reach out to your doctor? Do I need to reach out to your PT to come up and work with them as a team? And then looking at the daily and teaching, also monitoring of the body, because all these feelings and signs are the body communicating with us of what is going on inside of it, and we need to take those into account as we're doing our exercises because, set to set, they can change. When our fatigue level changes, sometimes that will change the adaptation of how we are bracing, and so those are all important. So, again, going back through working out is extremely safe. It's going to help prevent injuries by making you stronger and more resilient. That being said, we need to take into consideration the risks and rewards of exercise and how quickly to progress you and where you are starting at. And so when you start your workout routine, of course it's always great to work with a professional coach that knows how to work with injuries or has worked with your demographic, but you want to pay attention to your body.

Speaker 1 10:04

If a pain or discomfort is getting worse, you need to stop. You need to listen to your body and figure that out. If it's a position, maybe we tried a different positional change and that fixes it. Awesome, keep going. If it doesn't, let's move around that for today.

Speaker 1 10:20

Again, if you feel, if you're working out, and you feel your burning sensation and it goes away once you stop, it's most likely what we call muscle, the blood building up in the muscle getting that swelling feeling, and then it dissipates once you stop. If it is something that persists longer after the workout and seems to continually get worse or stiffer, then it is worth reaching out to your doctors. If it's gradually getting better, you might not need to. On that end, it's never wrong to reach out to a physical therapist or doctor if something feels off. So again, these are all signs of your body, trying to keep you safe, telling you what to do and then, as always, if you need help or guidance or any questions. That's what we specialize here at Spiraling Fist Fitness at and thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me today. Hopefully this has been official learning about injuries, how to work around injuries, how to pay attention to your body to keep yourself progressing while keeping you safe on your fitness journey.