For avid runners, part of the sport is living in the “pain cave” — a place just beyond your comfort zone where you’re pushing your body to be better, faster, and stronger. But while the “pain cave” should end with the run, for many runners, the pain often doesn’t. And for the unlucky few, that pain can turn chronic.
Anyone, runner or not, who has experienced acute or chronic pain knows how debilitating it can be. Add an aversion to needles, knives, or medications to the mix, and you’re probably wondering if you’ll ever be able to hit the pavement comfortably again.
Luckily, runners have more options these days that go beyond surgery. Non-invasive pain treatments are well-studied and well-established. Here, we’ll lead you through five non-invasive treatment options to help treat acute and chronic pain.
Exercising to help you recover from… exercising? Yup, you read that right.
Yoga, a mind-body form of exercise that emphasizes a focus on breathing, stretching, and hyper-awareness of the body, is an athlete’s secret weapon. (Seriously: even some football and basketball players roll out the yoga mat to stay pain-free.) But yoga has actually been shown to lessen chronic pain, too, especially when it’s in a place like your back. One study cited by Harvard suggests that consistent yoga practice is as effective in lessening chronic back pain as rehab.
Another study suggests that yoga can induce a “relaxation response” in the brain, which then reduces muscle tension, lowers your heart rate, and stabilizes your blood pressure, all things that can help diffuse the feeling of chronic pain. Moreover, when combined with meditation, yoga can help you deal with the emotional effects of acute or chronic pain better, which can in turn make pain actually feel less painful.
The bottom line: For runners experiencing chronic back pain, yoga’s effects (with the doctor’s orders) can be akin to physical therapy. Studies haven’t shown yet that yoga can cure chronic pain, but there’s ample evidence that it can help.
Pain, at its core, is a cognitive response. The body senses it, sends signals to the brain to process it, and then it’s the brain that says “Ouch, that hurts” or “We’re okay!.” Chronic pain happens when something’s malfunctioning in that system — maybe a nerve is being hypersensitive, or a receptor isn’t translating signals correctly. This, as anyone with chronic pain knows, can lead to depression and anxiety, especially when treatment options are limited.
Meditation is a compelling option to tackle both the physical and emotional effects of chronic pain. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce chronic pain by a whopping 57 percent, and some experienced meditators can reduce pain by 90 percent. Another study suggested that while meditation may not fix painful sensations, it can help people with chronic back pain cope with the pain better, thus making it feel more manageable in their everyday lives.
The bottom line: Meditation’s beneficial effects extend beyond the physical. For runners with chronic pain and a bit of patience, it could help them deal with pain over an extended period of time.
Before there was Tylenol, there was thermo- and cryotherapy (that’s hot and cold therapy, respectively). Using temperature to treat, regulate, and even cure pain has long been on humanity’s radar, especially above the Arctic circle (saunas and polar plunges weren’t just for fun, you know).
Hot and cold therapy works because of the way our bodies — and especially our blood vessels — respond to temperature. When exposed to heat, our blood vessels dilate, allowing blood to flow more quickly to the area where it’s being applied. The more blood in an area, the more oxygen is able to flow there, which speeds up the healing process. Cryotherapy has the opposite effect, but similar benefits. Cold application constricts our blood vessels, which helps reduce inflammation and swelling, and can improve range of motion.
The bottom line: The jury is still out on how well hot and cold therapy can reduce your pain in the long-term. But as a short-term solution after a big run, these two are a no brainer.
This is usually what athletes are pointed to in cases of acute and chronic pain treatment: physical therapy. In physical therapy, a person works over a series of appointments to strengthen and stretch the body in and around the site of pain. You’ll likely learn new movements, what parts of your body you’re putting too much pressure on, and how to move without further aggravating the area that’s giving you trouble.
There are, of course, some drawbacks: physical therapy can be time-consuming, painful, and expensive, depending on what you’ve got going on, and for some ailments at the tendon or bone level, it may only be able to help some.
The bottom line: If you’ve got the time and a great therapist, physical therapy could help you alleviate your chronic pain (and help you learn a little bit about how you use your body).
When it comes to chronic pain treatment for runners, shockwave therapy has been recognized by many runners as the gold standard in pain treatment. Shockwave therapy, which includes Radial Pressure Wave (also known as EPAT, or Extracorporeal Pulse Activation Technology) and Focused Shockwave (also known as ESWT, Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy), stimulates tissue repair in areas of the body where tissue is damaged or weakened. Put simply, it essentially kick-starts the body’s natural healing process.
Where yoga and physical therapy can help with more generalized areas of the musculoskeletal system, shockwave can help treat issues at the tendon level, like tendonitis and plantar fasciitis. Each session lasts only about 10 minutes and doesn’t require any anesthesia. Shockwave is evidence-based and backed by research, too. In fact, one independent study showed that a group of patients saw almost all of their symptoms resolved a full year after they received EPAT treatments.
This treatment option requires only a few appointments (depending on what kind of pain you’re dealing with), uses no needles or knives, requires no recovery time, causes no scarring, and best of all, allows runners to lace up those running shoes more quickly than other treatment options.
The bottom line: For runners who want to get back out there as soon as they can, shockwave might just be the go-to. Combine it with other regenerative treatment options offered at CuraGenex (talk to an EPAT physician about this) for even greater outcomes — then kiss chronic pain goodbye faster than you can say “On your marks, get set, go!”
CuraGenex provides the most advanced regenerative pain solutions like EPAT/ESWT to help athletes experiencing chronic pain get back on their feet. If you want to learn more about what CuraGenex can do to help you finally tackle your chronic pain, talk to a shockwave expert today.