Sports Physio
Pain and the Shooting Athlete By: Matt Zanis USA Shooting Physiotherapist
Did you know that the U.S. healthcare system spends approximately two billion dollars a year on the management of pain due to sport-related injuries? Pain creates a huge financial burden for athletes and is also the number one reason for lost practice and competition time. It dramatically influences athletic identity, mood, and anxiety levels. Pain leads to a vicious cycle of energy and time expenditure on imaging, surgeries, and especially highly addictive drugs. Put together, you have a seemingly mundane part of life turning into an alarming epidemic. It’s all in your head...kind of Pain is defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage” (International Association for the Study of Pain). It serves as a protective mechanism, telling you something in your body was harmed and needs to be protected. It is common and essential to the preservation of life and limb. Think about it, I sure wouldn’t want to be that guy who can’t feel his hand on a hot stove! Although the tissues of your body relay messages to the brain, pain is 100% an output from the brain. This messaging process is
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called nociception. Interestingly, nociception can occur in the absence or presence of pain, and pain can occur even in the absence of measurably noxious stimuli. Your tissues deliver information about heat and cold (thermal), position, pressure, loading (mechanical), and damage or inflammation (chemical). Think about all that time laying in prone position or rotating through the spine to follow the clay. The potential for injury increases with each training session. If the brain perceives this stress as a large enough threat, that perception of stiffness and pain will appear. Your brain is telling you your tissues have surpassed their ability to cope with that stress. Interestingly, MRI studies have failed to demonstrate a clear relationship between pathology observed on MRI and the athlete’s pain. In fact, research shows that roughly 80% of us all show some form of nasty “damage” like disc herniations, degenerative disc disease, and small fractures
USA Shooting News | End of Year 2018
but are completely pain free! What this means for athletes is it may be more helpful to forgo the expensive Polaroid and concentrate on strengthening tissues in good positions at a progressive rate in order to build tolerance to loads and stresses. This will in-
crease the threshold for nociception, which allows you to lift more weight, endure more training, and tolerate more “pain” and discomfort. The needle is pushed in the right direction! Pain in life is inevitable, suffering is optional One athlete with low stress/threat levels and who understands the role of pain is likely to recover faster than an athlete who is constantly on edge and takes the role as a victim, feeling helpless and externalizing blame. The literature shows