Is No Pain, No Gain a Good Approach to Exercise?

No pain, no gain is one of the most commonly used expressions in fitness and chances are just reading those words made you think about working out. Well, probably not just working out, but working out really hard.

It is known that the human body must be exposed to increasingly difficult challenges (higher weights, more reps, less rest, etc.) to stimulate further gains and exercising at an easy or comfortable level will, at best, only maintain your current fitness level. As a result, people often say no pain, no gain as a way to get the point across that you need to push yourself if you really want to improve. However, is no pain, no gain really an accurate statement?

I think this is an interesting question, because it is a case where the intent of the statement and the statement itself are not actually the same thing. I believe the intent of the statement, as stated above, is really to say that you need exercise at least somewhat outside your body's comfort zone if you want to experience further physical improvements. If the expression was instead, no challenge, no gain, I would say it is definitely true.

Unfortunately, the expression is no pain, no gain and the word "pain" is ultimately a problem. The suggestion that you need to experience pain to get positive results is a complete fallacy and while you do need a certain amount of difficulty, there is a big difference between a challenging workout and a painful one.

Exercising should never be painful, because pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong. If you ever experience pain during a workout, you are either doing something wrong or your body has a problem that needs to be addressed.

To be fair, even people who follow the no pain, no gain philosophy of training, probably don't try to push themselves until they are actually in pain, but they do typically push themselves as hard as possible. In some ways, this workout approach is encouraged, because no pain, no gain seems to suggest the closer you push your body to the point of failure, the more you will get out of your training. While that belief may sound reasonable, it is absolutely not true.

This attitude towards working out probably resulted from bodybuilders training to push each muscle to the point of complete failure in order to stimulate further muscle growth in muscles that are already rather large. The closer you are to your genetic potential, the harder you have to push yourself just to cause small improvements in your body. Elite level bodybuilders perform excessively high amounts (volumes) of exercise in an effort to get even larger muscles, but most people should not resort to those tactics.

Actually, continually pushing your body close to the point of failure is rarely the best approach and it is generally not even a good idea. When training for general health and fitness, strength, endurance, sports performance, and virtually every other type of physical improvement, it is better to hold back at least a little.

Pushing your body as hard as possible all the time causes your body to become worn down until you eventually experience overtraining, burnout, injury, or something else that compromises your results or causes you to have to take time off from exercising altogether.

It is always important to remember that recovery is an essential component of any training program. If you want to experience long-term progress, there must be a balance between performing challenging workouts and giving your body enough time to recover between workouts.

The harder you push yourself during a workout, the more time your body needs to adequately recover. If you always push yourself as hard as possible, there will eventually be a time when your body is not able to keep up with the demands of your training.

Getting back to no pain, no gain, this expression basically encourages people to exercise as hard as possible, without taking into consideration overall levels of fatigue, training volume, level of stress, physical health, etc. Naturally, this is not a smart or effective approach to training and in the long run it does more harm than good.

Therefore, no pain, no gain is certainly not a good approach to exercise, although it is a fact that you need to push your body to some degree if you want positive results. In the end it is all about finding the right level of difficulty in your workouts and this is one of the many cases in health and fitness where more is not always better.

Source:

14 years of experience and education in health and fitness