When pain persists, the entire nervous system changes in order to protect the organism, and these changes compound overtime. So, if your pain has persisted for longer than tissues take to heal, then increases in pain are far less likely to relate to changes in the state of your tissues and are far more likely to be to changes in the nervous system.

Recurrent pains are also often over-protective. If you have had a recurring pain for many years, each recurrence does not mean you have re-injured that muscle, joint, ligament or nerve. What it means is that something in your environment or behavior - such as a movement that caused the initial injury for example - was enough to activate the protective response.

So now you will be able to understand that, (acute trauma aside) "when I am in pain, it doesn't necessarily mean I am damaging myself."

Unfortunately, living with persistent or recurrent pain means fear of movement. We shrink our range of motion, avoid "scary" or "new" movements, and, sometimes, stop moving at all. All of the above signal to the nervous system that movement is, indeed, unsafe, and need to be guarded against.

Our nervous system armors itself with a mindset of mistrust and fear before moving (imagine what kind of muscle tension this brings on board), and soreness and fatigue afterwards.

It also splinters the body by tightening certain postural muscles (remember our previous week's topic: tight muscle = weak muscle?) and creating a grand variety of compensation patterns - something that we are addressing now on the mat.

Is there a way for us to benefit from movement without triggering the overprotective response of the nervous system?

A great way to pace yourself are to ask yourself these two questions as you move through your practice: