The Performance Enhancer Athletes Must Not Forget About
I often like to remind athletes that not all performance enhancers are illegal. In fact, I would argue legal performance enhancers are more beneficial than the illegal ones. Case in point is pain tolerance.
Athletes forget that pain tolerance is a performance enhancer. Those athletes who can condition their body longer in the face of pain will outperform those who can’t in clutch situations at the end of games or matches.
Having a high pain tolerance allows athletes to overcome obstacles, be resilient, work longer each day towards their goals, push their body harder when training, and stay positive under negative conditions. Simply stated, having a high pain tolerance for discipline, repetition, fatigue, boredom, and fear is a success differentiator that illegal performance enhancers can’t match.
Moreover, having a high pain tolerance for this type of pain is a mental skill not a physical skill. Dealing with the pain of discipline, repetition, fatigue, boredom, and fear are fundamental mental skills that elite athletes train daily. This is what mental toughness is.
The Process of Increasing Pain Tolerance
The process of increasing pain tolerance requires that athletes adopt the mindset of getting comfortable being uncomfortable. This is 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.