No Pain, No Gain?

by Mark Hatmaker

We’ve all heard that phrase in reference to sports training, and I think we’re all fairly certain we understand what it means. That four-word phrase stands as a sort of cognitive shorthand for all sorts of pertinent concepts; ideas such as discipline, the more you sweat in training the less you bleed in combat, fights are won in the gym not in the ring, the secret is in the drill. “No pain, no gain” and all of its slogan relatives point toward one way to growth — gain, and that path is work. And as the phrase states baldly, that work ain’t gonna be fun.

If we are completely honest with ourselves, how often do we see this phrase being embraced to its full meaning? I wager more often than not that we see lip service paid to “no pain, no gain” in most training regimens and instead we see the participation in the sport in question (e.g., MMA, submission work, street work) take the place of training and we pretend that this is sufficient pain. Au contraire.

Sport-specific training — whether technical work, strategic drilling, or what have you — is indeed vital to developmental excellence. But in sports that have such grueling competitive conditions (which hold just as true for street work as they do for combat sports competition), this sort of training is simply not enough. The sport-specific-training-only approach may cut it in sports/games with low metabolic demands — say golf or table tennis — but MMA, submission wrestling, and street work are all contact sports, and contact sports eat energy voraciously, sap strength left and right. Technical-training-only will not suffice to forge excellence.

Some of you may be familiar with the 1 percent concept, which asserts that high-performing athletes in many fields spend only about 1 percent of their time actually playing or practicing the game for which they are renowned. This concept is mirrored in the coaching programs of the vast majority of contact sports, whether football, rugby, boxing, wrestling, MMA, etc. In all these sports, the prep work is the primary focus. Top trainers in all contact sports utilize the pyramid method of training, where the base and middle sections consist of conditioning work and it is only the capstone of the pyramid that contains the technical overlay. This is the "iceberg concept”: it is the vast body of work beneath the surface veneer of the sport that does the damage.

If so many of the best and brightest across contact/combat sports esteem hard work, then why is this elementary concept embraced by so few? My guess is that we all know the answer to this — because it’s hard. When fans watch UFC Welterweight Champion George St. Pierre compete at such a high level, they covet his skill and want to possess it while not at the same time embracing his champion’s ability to push himself in training so hard that he might need to relieve himself with a “comfort bucket,” only to immediately rinse his mouth and go back to work. High-level performance requires high-level effort, and to be quite frank, most individuals choose to purposely ignore this fact.

There may be another reason for eschewing hard work, a reason that lies deep inside our brains, one that we conveniently allow to convince us that we are putting in the effort and going for the pain. Your body’s pain perception process is known as nociception. It is not to be ignored — you need pain to know when to get off that sprained ankle, to get your hand off the stove, and, yes, when to tap. Without nociception, chances of survival are low. Those unfortunate few born with congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA) are a danger to themselves because of faulty nociception. Those children afflicted with CIPA can appear normal at birth, but at first dentition the trouble starts (they can chew off their own fingers without being aware). The CIPA-afflicted seldom live past the age of 25 due to the accrual of injuries and/or infection from unperceived injuries.

Nociception is good; we need pain to know when to quit or alter our behavior for our own safety. I know this seem antithetical to our “no pain, no gain” argument, but we can actually use our scientific understanding of nociception to halt, rest, alter course when real pain is present, and make gains when “false pain” is being signaled. False pain?

Pain receptors are spread throughout the brain in what is known as the pain matrix. Each portion of the matrix signals information about a different aspect of the pain: location, intensity, duration, type of pain (burning, throbbing, sharp). The pain matrix then signals the feeling of distress to do what the CIPA-afflicted cannot: react to the pain in concordance with its severity. This feeling of distress is signaled in the anterior cingulate cortex, and here’s where a bit of falsehood can arise. The anterior cingulate cortex cannot differentiate between physical pain (punch, sprained ankle, burn) and emotional pain (broken heart, hurt feelings, anxiety). We can use this knowledge of the inability of the anterior cingulate cortex to differentiate to see if we can stand to turn up the heat a little bit more than we might imagine.

We’ve got to ask ourselves whether we avoid working as hard as we can (should) because of an actual physical roadblock, or are we (actually our anterior cingulate cortexes) interpreting our anxiety about pushing so hard as an excuse to stop? Is our racing heart and shortness of breath as dire as we might think, or is some of that a mis-read by that iffy portion of the brain? Our species colonized the globe in a variety of extreme climates without modern conveniences and endured hardships unimaginable to those of us in a comfy-enough position to read text on screens or in the pages of a magazine. Our bodies are remarkably resilient, astonishingly strong, and able to withstand enormous workloads. Great accomplishments are made possible only by dint of hard work. In other words — no pain, no gain.

By all means, at the first sign of real pain — deleterious pain — stop and assess. Stopping for discomfort? Probably not acceptable. Stopping for false pain? Ditto. No pain, no gain — yep, accurate with the exceptions of true pain.

Mark Hatmaker has appeared in 19 Paladin videos, including Gladiator Conditioning and Mega-Gladiator Conditioning video series. Mark is also the author of the MMA Mastery book series, available from Paladin Press.