New Research Suggests How Athletes Can Increase Pain Tolerance
As a mental skills coach, I always teach clients that managing the pain of fatigue in sports is 100% mental. Yes, of course there is a physical component to pain. However, there is no question that an athlete’s ability to endure the stress of pain changes as their mindset changes.
To that end, athletes must work on their mental skills as much as their physical skills to increase their pain tolerance. Typically, my first recommendation to do this is to use positive training pain. That is, strategically apply progressive pain as the training method to increase pain tolerance.
Training pain is synonymous with endurance sports such as track, wrestling, and boxing, albeit not always in its positive form. Moreover, even in the “ball sports” of football, basketball, tennis, and baseball coaches use conditioning as a form of training pain to build pain tolerance.
In short, some form of training pain (either negative or positive) is the go-to method for building pain tolerance for nearly all athletes. Today, I want to share some research that may one day change this.
An Alternative to Training Pain for Increasing Pain Tolerance
Yesterday, Runner’s World Magazine published an article titled “The Research-Supported Benefits of Meditation for Runners“. This article does a fantastic job breaking down both the “how to” and benefits of mindfulness meditation. In addition, the author cites a body of recent research (2020 and 2021) that suggests that meditation increases pain tolerance. The author writes:
Meditation can also improve your perception of pain and fatigue, which may prevent you from giving up or slowing down on the run. A 2020 study in Neural Plasticity showed athletes who completed mindfulness training improved endurance performances by having a higher threshold for exhaustion. And a 2021 study in the journal Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine found that following the completion of a mindfulness-based training program, female college students reported decreases in their perception of exercise intensity and other negative feelings, such as fatigue, following an 800-meter run…
Additionally, meditation can get you back on your feet sooner following a workout or injury. A 2021 study in the Journal of Athletic Training found mindfulness training, in conjunction with traditional physical therapies, reduced pain while running, improved coping strategies, and decreased pain catastrophizing in patients with knee pain.
This is solid data. I highly recommend you browse both this Runner’s World article and the studies they cite. As a practitioner of meditation myself, I can personally attest to its benefits. Certainly, meditation is no silver bullet. It’s harder than it looks and requires consistency to get the benefits.
Nonetheless, because meditation is not as physically taxing on your body as training pain, it’s well worth the effort. This is not an either-or choice, it’s a both-and. To increase pain tolerance, meditation is something athletes must work on in addition to following a process for training pain.