When Not to Listen to Your Body
It’s important to listen to your body. In general, you need to know how you feel and you need to be able to relate those feelings to past experiences: this is what it feels like when I lift more than usual and I’m about to set a personal best; this is how i feel when my old shoulder injury starts showing up.
But feelings are not facts, as psychologists sometimes say . Our body generates a lot of emotions, pain, fatigue and anxiety and “oh my gosh, this is something new”. When should you listen to what your body is telling you, and when should you ignore it?
I was forced to ponder this question after reading a recent article in Outside magazine that discussed some recent (and some not-so-recent) research into how elite athletes relate to their emotions and physical sensations. It turns out that the best athletes are often better at ignoring these feelings than the rest.
Which makes some sense, right? If you’re a pro and you know you can run a certain amount of time in a marathon, you won’t slow down just because your legs are tired. You trust your learning. You know your pace. You follow your plan.
The rest of us may not have calibrated our feelings so well. Especially since we are beginners, we do not always know what we are capable of. So here are a few times when you can ignore what your body is telling you and when to start paying attention again.
When something hurts but you’re mostly okay
If you don’t know why you’re in pain, it’s worth getting checked out. But often we have a minor injury or some soreness that we have been assured is not a big deal. Then we still catastrophize.
Catastrophizing is what it looks like. Our body says “oh” and our brain extrapolates wildly to “what if I never feel better again?” or “I don’t think running is for me.” We begin to pay more attention to the pain, which can actually make us more sensitive to it. This can happen when we’re recovering from a major injury, but it can also happen in the context of very minor things, like a little muscle soreness from yesterday’s workout.
Get medical advice, if needed, to find out what you really need to do or avoid to stay on the path to healing. But don’t be surprised if your physical therapist says that you need to start using the injured body part and start believing that your body can handle a little pain while it heals.
When something is uncomfortable because you’re not used to it
We pay special attention when something is new to us. But something can be new and intimidating without being a real threat. Over time, the sensations that on the first day were “oh, stop” signals become things to which we later respond “oh, this? I didn’t even notice.”
In the gym, this can mean the feeling of the barbell scratching on your hands, or the feel of a heavy bar on your back. Maybe you’re heading out for your first run and can’t stop thinking about how hot , sweaty , and thirsty you are. Use your brain to do a quick reality check: Am I at risk of heat stroke, or am I just not used to what it’s like to be on the treadmill in five minutes? If the latter, trust your brain more than your body.
When that small voice says, “I can’t.”
Someday you will surprise yourself with a personal best in the squat, or a record time in the mile, or you will complete a workout that you never thought you could finish. Seconds or minutes before that big win, you will probably have a moment where your body wants you to stop and you say no.
At the end of last year, I challenged myself by doing a series of 20 rep squats. So many times I reached 15, 10 or even 5 reps and every fiber of my being told me that everything, we are done, return the bar to the rack. There are no more reps available.
But I asked myself, do I need to stop or do I just want to stop? I came up with a rule: I will not rewind the bar while standing. I either finish the set or do another squat, fail in the middle of the rep and leave the bar on the belay. And you know what? I have completed each. A curse. Rep.
It is worth doing big, ambitious things. But for now, you should be doing this one rep at a time, for one minute. When you do five reps, you can’t ask yourself if you have 15 more. You just say, “Can I do one more?” Or, in the language of a motivational coach, flip each “What if I can’t?” in “What if I can?”