Developing An Athlete’s Pain Tolerance
A high pain tolerance is a requirement to become a better athlete. Unfortunately, in nearly every sport, developing skills to achieve specific results is painful. It requires conditioning the body to tolerate extreme fatigue, thousands of hours of repetition, performing while hurt, injury recovery, and learning from failure, among other things.
However, it’s an instinct for humans to avoid pain. So, coaches must have a plan to help young athletes overcome this natural motivation to avoid pain. Furthermore, this plan must start with the use of positive training pain.
Using Positive Training Pain to Develop an Athlete’s Pain Tolerance
Positive training pain is training to intentionally create non-threatening pain. The goal of positive training pain is to improve performance by pushing an athlete beyond fatigue while keeping the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. In contrast, the goal of negative training pain is not to improve performance or to keep the pain threshold under the athlete’s control. Negative training pain is more of a punishment than anything else.
Inexperienced coaches tend to depend on negative training pain most often. This is obviously a mistake as it does not lead athletes to enjoying the pursuit of skills and results, which is the ultimate job of a coach.
Developing pain tolerance must never be in the form of punishment as that is completely counterproductive. It’s simply a fact that humans are wired to avoid pain. So, when coaches use pain as a form of punishment, it just reinforces this motivation.
What makes the development of pain tolerance possible is that it’s something an athlete chooses because of the benefits. Correspondingly, as part of a coach’s plan they must spend time explaining these benefits before the system to develop pain tolerance is implemented. These benefits include building up the fundamental character traits athletes need to be elite such as:
- Resiliency
- Persistence
- Confidence
- Discipline
- Optimism
- Mental Toughness
Next, after the coaches explains and gets buy-in to these benefits, a pain tolerance progression is the next step. Positive training pain is the mindset of intentionally putting an athlete through a non-threatening painful experience to push them just beyond their pain threshold. The pain is non-threatening because:
1) It’s under the athlete’s 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 make the athlete better by increasing their tolerance of the pain to do what it takes to get better. Additionally, because positive training pain is a form of pain under the athlete’s control, they must know their limits. Consequently, to know their limits coaches must test and document their limits.
As a result, increasing pain tolerance requires a progression that the coach tracks with data. This progression starts with current abilities and then a gradual increase in difficulty as the athlete improves. This can be tracked using time, repetitions, or another metric such as effort or quality ranked on a scale from 1 to 10. It could also be a combination of one or more of these data points.
Regardless of the metric, athletes must be willing to test their absolute maximum limit. Then the next time be willing to push themselves to do a little more than they did the last time. As an athlete repeats this over and over, their pain tolerance will increase.