The Secret Sauce for Increasing an Athlete’s Pain Tolerance
Pain tolerance is one of the most important ingredients in an athlete’s mental toughness. Mental toughness is a character trait athletes must earn by successfully completing activities that require mental toughness. These activities include those that cause uncomfortable emotions that trigger fear, fatigue, stress, and even boredom.
If an athlete can’t deal with the pain of these emotions, they avoid activities that trigger these emotions. Therefore, increasing an athlete’s pain tolerance is critical to the process of developing their mental toughness.
With this purpose in mind, the secret sauce for increasing an athlete’s pain tolerance is to start with how they view pain. An athlete must view pain with the mindset that pain never goes away. Growth causes pain, conditioning causes pain, and pursuing difficult goals causes pain. In addition, trauma causes pain, injury causes pain, and disease causes pain. There is no way to magically just make these pains go away by increasing pain tolerance in any of these circumstances.
Unquestionably, pain is a part of life. Some causes of pain are good for you while others are bad for you. So, when it comes to increasing pain tolerance you must separate the good pain from the bad pain. Moreover, I’m only qualified to suggest how to increase pain tolerance for the causes of pain that are good. I must leave the trauma, injury, and disease aspects of pain tolerance to the doctors.
Given that, I suggest athletes and their coaches use a basic formula to increase pain tolerance for the pain that comes from growth, conditioning, and pursuing difficult goals. A simple way to remember this formula is to think of it as the process of getting comfortable being uncomfortable.
The Process of Getting Comfortable Being Uncomfortable with Pain
The process of increasing pain tolerance by adopting the mindset of getting comfortable being uncomfortable is just that, a process. A process that is repeated with intention and consistency. The fact about processes in general, and the process of increasing pain tolerance specifically, is that change doesn’t happen overnight.
By definition, a process requires a series of interrelated actions to create transformation. Therefore, when the transformation you want is to increase pain tolerance, then those interrelated actions must include experiencing pain. But not just any pain, it must be positive training pain.
Positive training pain is the mindset of intentionally putting yourself through a non-threatening painful experience to push yourself just beyond your pain threshold. The pain is non-threatening because:
1) It’s under your control to stop at any point.
2) It doesn’t threaten injury.
What’s more, the pain is “positive” because the specific intent of the painful experience is to improve mental toughness by increasing pain tolerance using a progression.
That last word “progression” is ultimately the final ingredient to the secret sauce for increasing pain tolerance. Being that positive training pain is a form of pain under your control, you must know your limits. Consequently, to know your limits you must test your limits. As a result, increasing pain tolerance requires a progression. A progression is the process of starting with your current abilities and gradually layering on new abilities as you improve.
In short, this means an athlete must be willing to test their absolute maximum limit. Then as soon as they recover and not a second later, do a little more than they did the last time. As an athlete repeats this over and over, their pain tolerance will increase.