Why do some athletes thrive under pain while others break down?
Video Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fast Chats. I’m Chris. is Trevor, of course. Today we’re talking about a fascinating subject, pain. Trevor, you love pain.
[00:00:10] Trevor Connor: I don’t love pain, but I love learning about it and certainly looking at how athletes deal with it. And we’ve got some new, relatively new studies that are really diving into how elite athletes handle pain.
They’re looking at alter endurance marathon runners. Uh, these are people that do an event longer than a marathon because pain is inevitable. You might get injured, uh, but if you’re doing 50 miles at some point over those 50 miles, you’re really gonna start feeling it and you have to So they wanna
[00:00:42] Chris Case: Yeah. I only have a little bit in the ultra running know in fact, the positives that you get into all these talk about the how elites Conceptualize it deal
[00:01:07] Trevor Connor: Yeah. And it was surprising you. What would you have expected for elite
[00:01:12] Chris Case: I mean, I would expect just say, oh, is higher, or something like that.
[00:01:19] Trevor Connor: And that wasn’t the case. Right. Um, what they really showed, so they do studies where they’ll take elite athletes and they’ll take a non-athlete and have them put their hand in cold water and, start giving estimates of the pain. And when they feel the pain and they showed elite athletes no higher pain tolerance quite average. Right. So they feel all the pain.
But what’s different
[00:01:44] Chris Case: Their, their brains are different. Yes. They’ve experienced a lot of this in the past, and they have understood how to how to feel like they have or meaning they have control There’s a host of reasons why their psychology different. and that’s a, a learned thing as well as a.
Possibly,
uh, they have been attracted sport because they were quote unquote born or naturally inclined to
[00:02:20] Trevor Connor: Yeah, and that was, so the first review that we talked about was human resilience and pain coping strategies.
A review of the literature, giving insights from elite, ultra endurance athletes for sports science, society. Um, and mouthful, it is a mouthful, and they really dived into is this something that you can learn or is this something just, you know, people who have this higher ability to cope with pain end up gravitating towards these sort of sports.
And they didn’t have an answer. They said, there does seem to be signs that you can learn this. Um, but it’s probably a But what I found. Particularly interesting was this other study that was the called, it’s titled The Prevalence and Perception of Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Use Among Alter Endurance Runners.
And this just came out like Um, and they went to one of these alter endurance events and looked at the difference between the elites who do this professionally versus the amateurs who Um, and they were looking at whether they were using painkillers or not, because it’s fairly known in this community that taking painkillers in really harm your kidneys. Um, so you really shouldn’t, but with something like 60%.
still took ’em. Um, but the reasons were very different. What you saw was in the recreational people participating in of for the first time, they basically took the painkillers when they started feeling pain because needed the help.
They
[00:04:00] Chris Case: reaction
[00:04:00] Trevor Connor: to, oh my
[00:04:02] Chris Case: There’s something I can do about pill. I’m gonna take it
[00:04:06] Trevor Connor: Right? Where the elites. Planned out their whole race and they planned out when they were gonna take their painkiller.
Yeah. And it was entirely performed.
[00:04:14] Chris Case: Yeah. I, I feel like toolbox for there’s any that it out and And that’s basically concluded.
[00:04:36] Trevor Connor: Yeah. They were asked about that and they just simply said, yeah, when I take this, I don’t find my performance drops that’s why I’m It wasn’t a, I feel a lot of purely So what was, so the third study we looked at is this one called, I Know You Love this title.
Pain is Inevitable, its Suffering is Optional. Relationship of pain coping strategies to performance in multi-stage ultra marathon runners. And this was a six day event?
[00:05:11] Chris Case: Three marathons in a row, day four, days in a row. Right? A double marathon effectively. five cool down, we’ll call it for the, for the last, hey, do the event.
And then you might find out why they, the last day is so short,
[00:05:29] Trevor Connor: this, this is fair. And they were really looking at, uh, whether people dropped out of
[00:05:36] Chris Case: It’s a, not so much a, I mean, it is a it’s like.
people are
in it to complete it rather than
[00:05:44] Trevor Connor: And it was interesting
[00:05:46] Chris Case: Yeah. Um, there are maladaptive, the maladaptive strategies like, I have a little bit of catastrophize it, you turn it into a much That’s that classic downward spiral. you might also, uh. Feel three that’s hinting pain averse to just drop out of the event. That
[00:06:15] Trevor Connor: would be a, so fear of
[00:06:16] Chris Case: Fear
of
[00:06:18] Trevor Connor: avoid. Yep. And then some of the adaptive strategies. So believe it or not, trying to just is not, just, you can’t, you’re gonna
feel But reappraisal of the pain. So you can say, Hey, this is part of the event, this is part of the experience. This is actually a positive. Or a lot of elite athletes will turn it into kind of a metric. is how I can measure whether I’m going too hard or going too easy.
[00:06:46] Chris Case: It’s also a, it is a gauge of performance
[00:06:50] Trevor Connor: What were some of the other adaptive strategies?
[00:06:52] Chris Case: I think elite athletes job of separating from the pain, but also part of in fact, it why they do it to some degree. Like it’s part of
[00:07:10] Trevor Connor: So what I found interesting in the study is they looked at a whole lot of things that correlated with whether they finished the event or they, they dropped And they only found two that actually correlated. One was age, so if you were older, more likely you were gonna drop out.
The other was the maladaptive If you employed maladaptive strategies, you were more likely to drop out. Adaptive strategies
[00:07:38] Chris Case: very The, way I would is that denying maladaptive strategies, quelling the, urge to have a maladaptive itself an
[00:07:55] Trevor Connor: I would agree with that because a lot of the ways avoid those maladaptive strategies So I I agree completely. So, yeah. You know, interested, they say that, but I, I think it’s mostly employing psychological to,
handle You know, going back to the review, I think the other interesting thing that they showed. You again. They were, they, they kept going back to, is this something that you learn or do people who just have a really good ability to cope, gravitate towards the sports. But they did say one thing that clearly you can learn is And they said mental toughness correlates with cope, your ability to cope with um, and mental toughness. They, they really put two things in there. One was a sense of self-efficacy. The other one was persistence. So persistence is, no matter how bad this gets, at it.
[00:08:48] Chris Case: an Yeah.
[00:08:51] Trevor Connor: Self-efficacy is that feeling of, I have control over my Um, so that’s the, if you’re in the middle of the event and you get injured, you know, somebody’s gonna, oh, look at my horrible luck. There’s nothing I can do about this. This sucks. They pull out. Where the other person might go, okay, I need to slow down.
I’m gonna band. So let’s say they injured their ankle, I’m gonna bandage up my ankle. They kind of have a strategy for it. They feel they still have control
[00:09:21] Chris Case: Yeah. And
[00:09:23] Trevor Connor: difference between
[00:09:24] Chris Case: because of a whole. L checklist If I feel this, then I can do this, do this.
have the sense of control. They also literally have control. They’ll take action avoid whereas those without like, oh my God, I don’t done means I don’t
[00:09:55] Trevor Connor: Yep.
[00:09:55] Chris Case: Avoid pain, drop out
[00:09:58] Trevor Connor: And what this review talked about, taking that a step further, is this whole idea of locus of control. That there are people that feel that their locus of control is They, they, are the Well, there’s other people who feel their, their locus of control is the world kind of controls Um, and they then looked at this outside of the sports arena and said, people who have external locus of control, um, tend to be more passive when they’re dealing with pain. They tend to go to more of a pharmaceutical To try to cope with some legal, some illegal
Um, where people who have an internal locus of control are gonna be
[00:10:42] Chris Case: could talk about
[00:10:44] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:46] Chris Case: topic. We do talk at length
