To heal chronic pain, work with this: 🧠 , not with this: 💪

People keep asking me, “what kinds of workouts are part of your chronic pain program?”

As a personal trainer who has been working with people in pain for over 15 years, it’s easy to understand why people would think my program lies in movement and strength training.

But actually, in my years of training folks with chronic pain, only a very small fraction of people have had a significant reduction in their pain from exercise alone, especially if it’s severe and has persisted for years.

This is because, while it can sometimes get its start in the body, most chronic pain lives in the brain. That is NOT to say that chronic pain isn’t real! To someone who is suffering with chronic pain, nothing in life could be more real than their pain.

And actually, ALL pain is in the brain. Here’s how it works with acute pain:

(1) An injury occurs, and a signal is sent from the affected tissues to the brain.

(2) The brain interprets that information. If the brain interprets it as dangerous, then…

(3) The brain sends a signal back to the tissues, and you feel pain.

Your brain does this to keep you safe and prevent further exposure to whatever caused your injury, and to remind you to go easy on your body while your injuries are healing.

With chronic pain, the brain learns that pathway, then repeats it in the absence of an actual injury. Chronic pain is a neural pathway.

And neural pathways exist in the brain, not in the body. Therefore, the treatment for chronic pain lies in mental and emotional work, not in physical work.

In my 20 years of suffering with chronic neck pain, shoulder pain, and migraines, I tried SO many physical and medical treatments to cure my pain, including massage, acupuncture, physical therapy, herbal medicine, and even seeing medical doctors who specialize in migraine treatment. None of it worked. What worked was the kinds of modalities that make up my program, Stronger Than Chronic Pain.

Don’t get me wrong, exercise is great! I still believe that everyone will benefit from smart, appropriate exercises for their unique body.

And, exercise still has a place in healing from chronic pain – most people with chronic pain avoid movement and exercise in the fear that it will cause more pain or injury.

Even as a personal trainer, I used to have pain any time I did work with my upper body, leading me to avoid doing strength training exercises for years. Over time, my upper body became deconditioned, making it even harder to exercise it or even do anything using my upper body.

What I learned in my healing journey was that doing work with my arm didn’t actually directly cause pain. I had built a neural pathway in my brain that associated upper body work with pain – because I believed that working my upper buddy would cause me pain, it did!

The pathway looked like this: when I did upper body strength exercises, a signal went to my brain that those muscles were working. Because of my belief that it would cause me pain, a deep, often unconscious part of my brain (the amygdala) received the information that my body was working, thought, “this is dangerous,” and then sent a pain signal to my muscles, to try to stop me from doing what that it thought causing me injury. I’d end up in pain, which fortified the belief that upper body strength training would cause me to have migraines.

I unlearned this pathway by building a new pathway, which enabled me to slowly start integrating upper body exercises back into my routine, until I had built back my capacity to do hard upper body workouts, pain free.

Exercise never really directly caused me pain. But it did trigger a pathway that caused me pain.

In my program, Stronger Than Chronic Pain, I will show you how to build new, pain-free pathways, lessen your brain's use of old, painful pathways, and start doing all the things you’ve been avoiding because of your pain.

The program starts September 17th, but enrollment is open now! You can learn more about the program and sign up here.