Does Your Workout Suck?

I spoke with a client yesterday about his resistance training program. It seemed like he had a solid plan and was making good progress. But I did disagree with one aspect of his approach, which was his workout motto: Working Out Sucks™. His motto is a reminder that he won’t achieve his goals without working hard enough to be fairly miserable for at least part of the workout.

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Inspiring Quotes on Why Movement Matters

Here's a few cool quotes about movement that you may find inspiring or interesting. In the modern world we tend to value "higher" mental functions like reasoning and language over "lower" functions like motor control and body awareness. And therefore kids spend less time in recess, adults spend more time in office chairs looking at computers, and our mental lives become more virtual and abstract as opposed to concrete and embodied.

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Pain and Learning

What does chronic pain have to do with learning? Here's a quick post with links and quotes from three new papers that help explain the role of associative learning in chronic pain. Because many of the quotes contain a bunch of fancy language, here's a quick bit of background on the key concept - learning through pavlovian association

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A Systems Perspective on Chronic Pain

We can better understand the complexity of chronic pain, and its relationship to other multi-symptom disorders, by learning something about systems theory. The basic idea is that chronic pain is often driven by dysregulation of a “supersystem” that coordinates defensive responses to injury. The supersystem results from dynamic interaction between different subsystems, most notably the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system.

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