Stress and Chronic Pain Management

Since 1977, I've been offering stress management and biofeedback to people suffering from chronic pain. Both within inpatient pain management facilities and in out patient pain management clinics. Stress does not cause chronic pain, but it can make the intensity of chronic pain worse. People suffering pain develop a habitual response to their constant companion. By "bracing" to deal with their pain, people begin to produce muscle tension that can increase pain or that can interfere with the ability to get a better quality of sleep. A deep, restful sleep can help us to tolerate or to cope with our pain. Poor sleep can make us more irritable and more susceptible to the anxiety that increases pain.

In many chronic back pain patients, their back pain can be much worse when they unconsciously tighten their legs, neck, shoulders, or other back muscles as a response to their pain. These muscles are attached to bones. In the case of muscles attached to vertebrae, these tight muscles can cause irritation to nerves that move from the spinal cord to the various body parts that they serve. When tight muscles cause "pinching" to these nerves, or to the blood supply that feeds these nerves, the nerves can respond by being irritated and adding to discomfort or numbness. Pain that is not caused by soft-tissue injury, like osteoarthritis, can create the tension that causes fatigue, poor sleep, and possibly additional muscle-contraction pain (like tension headaches, jaw pain, or neck/shoulder tension.)

With few exceptions, people with chronic pain benefit from stress management and, in many cases, use biofeedback to help then get back in control of the levels of pain that they are experiencing. Biofeedback can measure levels of muscle tension and can help with learning to reduce the muscle tension. Temperature training biofeedback can assist patients in learning to release or to "let go" of their anxiety and this can help to reduce the intensity of their pain complaints.

Chronic pain patient respond to a variety of Western relaxation techniques. One technique, Autogenic Training phrases, is a series of mentally repeated phrases that command relaxation such repeating "my right arm is heavy" until the muscles of that arm relax to the point where it feels heavy, comfortable and relaxed. Progressive relaxations, visualizations, indirect suggestions, and even certain breathing techniques have all been very useful for people suffering with chronic pain complaints. These techniques do not work as fast as medications. They require regular practice and it may take 8-12 weeks for the benefits to begin. The advantage is that these techniques do not have the side-effects that medication might. Once these techniques are learned, there are no ongoing costs. And, most importantly, these stress management techniques offer the sense of personal control over the pain. The motivated person will develop a powerful, life-long skill by mastering these techniques.

There several articles at the Stress Education Center's website that will be very helpful to chronic pain patients and their families. These are articles that have been taken from my book, "Guide to Stress Reduction" which is available through the library or to purchase. If you are suffering from chronic pain, you can do something to help yourself. I can't promise that the pain will leave and never return, but you can learn to help control the intensity of your pain and possibly reduce your long-term reliance on pain medications. Discuss these strategies with your doctor to determine how you can best use these tools to participate in managing your pain.

Please take good care of yourself.

Welcome to article number five in our 5-part series "Bodybuilding Sins That Cause Back Pain and Missed Workouts". In this article we are going to cover some basic, yet powerful training principles that are often overlooked and are responsible for nearly all bodybuilding injuries?

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can view them using the links below.

Here's a breakdown of the articles to look for:

1. Article #1 - Choosing The WRONG Exercises 2. Article #2 - Training Variations for Pain Relief and Maximum Results 3. Article #3 - Targeted Stretching 4. Article #4 - Targeted Exercises 5. Article #5 - Rest, Recovery, and Injury Prevention

Article #5 - Rest, Recovery and Injury Prevention

Many of the injuries that bodybuilders suffer from could be easily prevented just by allowing the body enough time to rest?

While most bodybuilders dread hearing the word "rest", many fail to realize that there is far more to rest than just avoiding overtraining. When you perform a tough workout you not only stress that muscle or muscle group, you also place stress on the cardiovascular, neuromuscular and components of the immune system?

For example, many bodybuilders will train their chest 2-3 times a week and spend an hour or more performing dozens of exercises just for the pecs?

While this may sound ok to some, when you add in the stress of other workouts it can quickly add up to too much stress in one or more ways. I hear bodybuilders all the time say "I let my body rest by splitting up my workouts" and "I worked chest yesterday so today I'll train my back"? that's NOT rest!

When you train your back, your chest still gets worked, stressed and it also slows down your bodies ability to recover from stress and repair damage from previous workouts?

So don't kid yourself and think that you can train this way over the long term? it may take years or just a few weeks, but sooner or later your body will break down!

Let me give you a real life example from my experience?

I, like nearly every single bodybuilder out there, created muscle imbalance unknowingly by following the workouts recommended in all the books, magazines, etc?

I trained 4,5 and sometimes even 6 days a week and thought that I was resting enough by splitting my workouts? to make a long story short, after just a few years I had tendonitis in both triceps because I worked chest, tri's and shoulder too often, too intensely and didn't balance out my training?

I also had lower and middle back pain, knee problems and IT band tendonitis because my lower body workouts weren't balanced? I spent too much time doing heavy squatting, too often and neglected important muscles?

These injuries stayed with me for months, years and I still can have an occasional flare up if I don't stay consistent with a balanced training program. I was able to create all this damage by the age of 22? I am now 28 and will have to spend the rest of my life trying to prevent these old injuries from coming back and causing more pain and problems?

Don't do what I did! And if you already have, you better act fast and take a serious look at your training and your goals because if you don't, you will spend the rest of your life in pain and frustrated by all the injuries, big and small.

So here's my?

5-Step Formula for Quickly Eliminating and Preventing Aches, Pains and Injuries

Step 1. Rest and Recovery

The first thing you need to do is REST! And no, I don't mean take a day or two off? I mean no workouts for at least a week or more? you need to give your body a chance to reduce the inflammation before you can begin work on eliminating or correcting the cause of the problem. You may also want to use things like a heating pad, hot tub or massage to help reduce the inflammation and speed up the healing and recovery?

Step 2. Identify Muscle Imbalances

The next thing you need to do is find out which muscle imbalances have created your injury or are causing your pain and work towards correcting them? you can do this quickly and easily by performing physical assessments in which you are looking for strength and flexibility imbalances in all opposing muscle groups.

You can do these assessments yourself and they are covered in our Lose the Back Pain Video Tip! Another cause of lower back pain for runners is the thought that running is about going forward, okay of course it is, but it doesn't require you to ?push' forward to do it. Running is really about passing a force into the ground and using the hip, knee and ankle joints to translate that into a forward motion.