Pains that appear "for no reason"… really?

"I woke up Monday morning with a sore neck, but... I didn't do anything special during the night!?"

"I came back from my run, everything was fine, and a few hours later my ankle was stiff and painful, but I didn't fall?"

Do these sentences sound familiar? Perhaps you or a family member have already experienced similar situations. They leave you perplexed as to why pain suddenly appears for no apparent reason.

Differentiating between an injury and pain:

Indeed, we often confuse the following 2 concepts: Injury and pain.
During an accident, for example, a fall on a bicycle, there will likely be injuries. Whether the injured tissue is skin, muscle, or ligament, this injury causes pain. Especially at the very beginning, during the inflammatory reaction, when the body brings the necessary chemical ingredients to promote tissue healing.

This phase of significant pain generally lasts 48 hours to 4 days. After this, the pain gradually decreases over the following weeks, depending on the tissue that needs to heal. This example helps us understand that injury equals pain. But you probably already knew that.

What might surprise you more: We absolutely cannot assert the opposite. Pain ≠ injury.

For example: A severe headache doesn’t mean your brain or skull is broken or damaged. It’s common to feel pain without any injury.
Not convinced? Think about that famous “brain freeze” you get when you eat a popsicle too fast…unpleasant, yes, but nothing dangerous about it!

Our perception of pain acts as an alarm signal to our body, alerting us to a perceived potential danger. Often, it's our body's way of telling us that its internal balance is disrupted. In other words, it's overloaded; we've given it more stress (physical or mental) than it can handle under the current circumstances.

How does an overuse injury occur?

When an overload pain occurs, you have to ask yourself questions:

• Are there things that have been stressing my body more than usual lately?
• An overload injury can occur when increasing a sports activity (longer duration or intensity = more shocks, twists, tension)
• Unusual demanding one-time activity: doing spring cleaning, moving, shoveling, etc. 
• Unusual sustained position: standing at a concert, crashing all weekend on a couch, etc. 
• Changes in posture: car, office, etc.
• Psychological stress

What factors predispose you to an overuse injury?

Are there factors in my life that have recently made my body less resistant to stress?

• Illness
• Lack of sleep
• Change in diet 
• Sedentary lifestyle 
• Loss of physical fitness (e.g., summer vs. winter), 
• Frequent alcohol or tobacco use

How to control overuse pain?

The key to managing overload pain: quantifying mechanical stress.

Think of your ability to handle the amount of stress applied to your tissues during sports and daily activities as a budget. If your body is less resistant lately, you have a smaller budget, and you need to adjust your activities accordingly to avoid putting yourself in a risky situation where you are stressing your body beyond its tolerance, which could lead to pain.

When you put stress on your body (e.g., by increasing your running distance), you should do so in small, gradual, and slow increments to give your tissues time to make the necessary adaptations and increase their resilience (and thus your “budget”).

To learn everything and become a master of quantifying mechanical stress.

To know what to do in the event of a running overload injury.