Current Pain Tolerance Does Not Dictate Future Pain Tolerance
Just because one athlete can push through pain better than another does not mean their future pain tolerance is a fait accompli. Research shows that it’s possible to increase pain tolerance.
The first way to increase pain tolerance is to use positive training pain. Positive training pain is training to intentionally create non-threatening pain to build tolerance that is not injury related. The goal is to push an athlete beyond fatigue in their muscles and lungs while keeping the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. This requires gradually pushing the athlete further and further beyond their initial point of fatigue using a progression over time.
The second way to increase pain tolerance is to use self-talk. David Linden, Ph.D. a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine provides research that suggest that what an athlete is thinking in the moment of pain impacts the intensity of the pain they feel.
This suggest that positive self-talk reduces the intensity of pain and negative self-talk increases the intensity of pain. The actual level of pain does not change, only how the athlete responds to it. Therefore, training an athlete to default to neutral or positive self-talk will increase the athlete’s pain tolerance.
Both of these methods are proven ways to change an athlete’s relationship with pain.