We’ve all experienced it: when your physical effort in exercise gets close to the limit of your endurance, it feels incredibly painful. So, can a person’s ability to tolerate pain predict their endurance performance?
Research shows that athletes—especially endurance athletes—are indeed more willing to endure pain.
Here’s one experiment for measuring how pain affects endurance: researchers strap a blood-pressure cuff tightly around a participant’s arm to cut off its blood supply, then have them clench and release their fist once per second. It doesn’t take long before they start feeling uncomfortable.
The number of fist clenches from the first clench to the first moment they begin to feel uncomfortable is defined as the ‘pain threshold’—the critical point between ‘not painful’ and ‘starting to feel pain.’
As the number of fist clenches increases, the participants become more and more uncomfortable until they give up. The number of clenches from the start of the task to giving up is defined as the ‘pain tolerance threshold’—the upper limit of how much pain a person can stand.
A large number of experiments have found that excellent athletes are no different from ordinary people in their ‘pain threshold,’ but their ‘pain tolerance threshold’ is much higher. This shows that excellent athletes aren’t insensitive to pain—the point at which they begin to feel it is the same—but are better able to tolerate it. For athletes, ‘being able to endure hardship’ isn’t merely a descriptive phrase; it’s a hard metric that can actually be measured.
So here I run into the classic chicken-and-egg question: are people who are naturally better at tolerating pain more likely to become excellent athletes, or do athletes become better at tolerating pain through training?
Although we can’t rule out the first possibility, research has shown that the ‘pain tolerance threshold’ can be raised through training. In 2017, one study compared the effects of two training methods on the endurance of cyclists. One group did six weeks of moderate-intensity continuous cycling, while the other did six weeks of high-intensity interval training—alternating between high-intensity cycling and rest intervals. The latter type of training would undoubtedly produce higher peaks of pain.
Because the demands of the two training programs were broadly similar, the two groups had the same physical fitness at the end of training, as measured by VO2 max and lactate threshold. But they had two key differences:
First, the high-intensity group’s pain tolerance threshold increased by 41% compared with before training, while the moderate-intensity participants showed no change at all.
Second, even though their fitness improved to a similar degree, the high-intensity group made greater gains in performance. In one test, the time until exhaustion while cycling increased by 148% for the high-intensity interval group, but by only 38% for the moderate-intensity training group. Interestingly, individuals’ improvements in the test were positively correlated with their increases in pain tolerance.
I’ve recently seen quite a few popular fitness articles saying that high-intensity interval training and moderate-intensity continuous exercise can produce similar fitness benefits. But in light of research like this, high-intensity interval training seems to have an even stronger effect on improving endurance. Looks like when I’m pedaling the elliptical while watching Yes, Prime Minister, I’ll have to add a few sprints too—on top of trying not to laugh.
References:
1. Hutchinson, A. (2018). Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.
2. Morris, M. G., Collett, J., Howells, K., & O’leary, T. (2017). Learning to Suffer: High-But Not Moderate-Intensity Training Increases Pain Tolerance. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 49(5S), 700.
P.S.
For the Yes, Prime Minister reference, see Lesson 068, ‘The Black Technology of Enhancing Endurance,’ in New Insights in Psychology ^_^
Note
- This article in the ‘New Insights in Psychology’ series was written as a popular-science/assorted-thoughts short piece to accompany related content from Zhichao Wei: New Insights in Psychology. It was published on the now-closed platform Fantu, and the original link no longer exists.
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