pain

Regular Exercise Isn’t Easy, But It’s Worth It

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

There is always a reason not to exercise. Being dedicated to exercise and staying healthy is extremely hard. For starters, it takes time to exercise, and the payoff of exercise is not immediate. Often, doing the necessary workouts seems to hurt. However, after getting into the routine, suddenly one realizes they hurt less. Everyone does need to exercise just to maintain a healthy body. When one has a chronic condition, it becomes more work, but it is also more important just to keep everything working in the best possible shape.

As a pain doctor, I often preach about exercising. It is one of the most important aspects of pain treatment. It is written about in most textbooks on pain. I used to talk about it less, but after having more problems with my own back, and seeing the effect on others who took exercise seriously, I began to be more vocal. The first step is committing to your health and to exercise. This means that you have to be dedicated to meeting a definite exercise goal and have a means to monitor whether you met the goal. A starting goal would be those by the American Heart Association for physical activity in adults. They include moderate to intense aerobic activity for 30 minutes, 5 days a week. Better, would be 25 minutes vigorous activity 3 days and moderate muscle strengthening 2 days a week.

What Counts as Exercise?

To count as exercise, it should be outside the realm of the activity that is being done for your employment. The reason is physical activity has a direct positive affect on the brain; maximize this by not distracting it from possible negative thoughts about work. One should also keep track of your exercise to see if you are meeting your goals. A fitness tracker, such as an app on your smartphone or a Fitbit, keeps one honest on whether you are meeting your goals.

Regular Exercise

I have had problems with low back pain. My lumbar spine has one very bad disc and severe spinal stenosis with pinching of the nerve roots. Once I became serious with a good exercise routine, management of my back pain improved. It is not easy to be consistent, but the reduced pain and better sleep is worth it. To get my exercise done, I need to do it before work, at the beginning of the day. Fortunately, I am a morning person, but I am awake before 5 a.m. to get it done. My goal daily is at least 30 minutes of moderate activity and 10,000 steps on my tracker.

The exercise routine I follow is during the week is 3 days of intense core and whole body strengthening with 2 days lighter core strengthening and intense aerobic activity. I exercise for about 45 minutes, combining strength and aerobic routines. On the weekends, one day usually I do a full strengthening routine with a full aerobic workout; the other day is light core and aerobic exercise. Every day I will do core strengthening, usually 10-20 minutes, with rubber tubing and floor exercise. Core exercises have greatly decreased the low back and leg pain, making it minimal most of the time. Aerobic conditioning keeps the overall endurance adequate to be active throughout the day.

If one wants to be healthy, one has to do the work to keep healthy. There is no free ride, not even for the doctor. There are sacrifices to be made to stay healthy, like getting up early in the morning. The pay off, less need to complain about your pain, fatigue, and health.

How Exercise Affects Your Brain

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

A recent article in the Chicago Tribune by Julie Deardorff gives a person another reason to exercise. Physical fitness has a crucial role in how the brain develops and functions. From infancy to old age, exercise is linked to positive changes in the brain.

Brain ExercieStarting in infancy, movement is necessary for proper development. In children, exercise has been shown to improve attention and focus, as well as developing coordination and ability to perform complex motions. In the elderly, new work is showing the benefit of physical exercise in staving off dementia.

Brain Benefits

Physical exercise has a broad range of benefits for the brain. These effects are true across our whole life span. Higher cognitive functions of attention, memory and multi-tasking are improved by exercise. In the 1990’s, the protein brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) was found. This protein supports the growth of brain cells. Exercise triggers the production of BDNF.

Now we know exercise is good for all aspects of the body, and doctors and health associations are taking note. The American Heart Association has promoted exercise for the improving your heart health. Pain physicians have promoted exercise to reduce pain by elevating endogenous opioids in the body. All physicians promote exercise to help in healing injuries, as exercise is critical to keep us healthy in mind and body. There is no perfect pill that will alleviate your ailments; sometimes the best course of action is to get off the couch and go for a run.

The Importance of Regular Summer Exercise

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

The unofficial start of summer has come and gone as the Memorial Day weekend is in the rearview mirror, and that means we are in full swing of the outdoor season. Spring cleaning and all the summer chores also have come. It is now the time to become a weekend warrior, and using a bit of wisdom is necessary to prevent injuries. None of us are immune to injury, but using some common sense may go a long way to prevent injury.

One way to prevent injuries during the summer is to stay fit. Fitness involves two aspects – cardiovascular aerobic strength and muscle power strength. Both parts of conditioning are equally important, but many people want to do just one of the two. Without both aspects, injury is more likely.

Summer Workout

Aerobic and Muscle Training

Aerobic conditioning is exercise that stresses the endurance strength of the body. It allows us to continue activities for a prolonged time. The classic aerobic exercise is running. It increases the heart rate and promotes the efficient use of energy. Any activity that increases the heart rate qualifies for aerobic conditioning. This can be fast walking, swimming, bicycling, tennis, or any sport that requires continuous movement. The goal is for most people is at least 30 minutes of day, and this should be outside of “work” so that the brain gets the benefit of relaxation. To further promote this, obtain a fitness tracker, such as a Fitbit and log 10,000 steps a day. Hitting an aerobic goal of 30 minutes of exercise and 10,000 steps will help maintain overall fitness and help with other things such as weight control.

As a pain specialist, strength conditioning has two parts. The first is overall muscle strength throughout the body. The second part is core strength, the muscles that stabilize the spine. Working out at a gym or lifting weights generally works on the large muscles in the body, the arms and legs. Good general strength allows us to do many activities and not hurt later. Core strength is much harder and targets more specific muscles. To strengthen these muscles, one needs to concentrate on working these specific muscles with very targeted exercises. The workout for the core does not require much equipment, often just gravity and body positioning is sufficient to work these muscles. Good resources for core strengthening are available on the web, use the Google search term, “lumbar core strengthening”. A good starter site is available via Princeton. Additionally, many smartphones have good apps for general muscle strengthening exercises.

A good exercise program will help prevent injury. It will give a person more ability to do the jobs around the house and not be to sore afterward. It is okay to be sore for a day or two, but if one is sore longer than that, then one is likely doing too much repetitive work on a single occasion. It is time to become more active, work on both strength and endurance, and spend some time having fun.

Exercises Can Alleviate Fibromyalgia Pain

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

exercise fibromyalgia.Research out of Spain confirmed the belief that exercise and physical fitness can help relieve symptoms due to chronic pain and fibromyalgia.

To conduct their experiment, researchers asked participants to refrain from using pain medications for at least 24 hours, then they measured their pain levels using a number of different scales, including the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS) and the Chronic Pain Self-Efficacy Scale. After pain was measured, researchers surveyed patients about their exercise habits. Although the findings don’t prove causation, researchers uncovered:

  • Patients with higher physical activity exhibited lower levels of pain.
  • Those who exercised more had a lower psychological overreaction to pain.
  • Fitness appeared to decrease negative thoughts about chronic pain.

“These results might have implications for future intervention studies in this population,” the investigators wrote in Arthritis Care and Research. “In general, there was a linear (dose-response) relationship so that higher levels of fitness were associated with lower levels of pain and catastrophizing and higher self-efficacy.”

The team concluded that fitness helped improve overall agility, flexibility and mobility. They believe strength conditioning can help increase pain tolerance, while aerobic exercises can help a person with some of the mental aspects of chronic pain and fibromyalgia.

“Our exploratory analyses suggest that muscle strength and flexibility could be the fitness components most strongly associated with pain levels, while aerobic fitness and flexibility could be the fitness components most strongly associated with the psychological experience (i.e. catastrophizing and self-efficacy) of pain,” wrote the authors.

Dr. Cohn Comments

The benefits of exercise for chronic pain have been well documented, so it should come as no surprise that regular exercise can help alleviate problems associated with fibromyalgia.

I’ve even written about how exercise has helped me control my pain condition. If you’re suffering from chronic pain, try to squeeze in some regular exercise. Even 15 minutes of walking can do wonders for your mind and body. If some exercises are too trying, try to find an activity that works for your condition. Whether it’s running, walking or swimming find an activity that works for you!

Insomniacs More Prone to Chronic Pain

/ Thomas Cohn, MD

Findings out of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health suggest that people who have trouble sleeping are more likely to have an increased sensitivity to pain.

Although the study didn’t show a cause-and-effect relationship, researchers said insomniacs were more likely to be sensitive to pain. For the study, researchers asked more than 10,000 adults to dip their hands in cold water for 1 minute and 46 seconds. If they felt the cold water was causing too much pain, participants could remove their hands from the water prior to the completion of the timer.

Insomnia

After their reading was recorded, researchers asked participants a bunch of questions about their sleeping habits, including how long they typically sleep, how long it takes them to fall asleep, and if they suffer from insomnia. Researchers also asked questions about related issues that can make it hard to fall asleep, like anxiety, stress and depression.

Study Results

After looking at the findings, researchers uncovered:

  • Nearly 1/3 of participants were able to keep their hands in the water for the entire test.
  • 42 percent of people with insomnia pulled their hands out of the water early.
  • 31 percent of people without the sleep disorder pulled their hands out of the water early.
  • Participants with frequent insomnia were more likely to remove their hands from the water than people who have insomnia once a month.
  • People with insomnia and chronic pain were twice as likely to have a reduced pain tolerance than participants without those conditions.

“While there is clearly a strong relationship between pain and sleep, such that insomnia increases both the likelihood and severity of clinical pain,” researchers wrote, “it is not clear exactly why this is the case.”

Dr. Cohn Comments

Although the findings are interesting, they are hardly revolutionary. In fact, it’s more of a chicken-and-the-egg type argument. People who have chronic pain are more likely to be plagued by nagging pain, which can make it difficult to fall asleep and stay asleep, and if you don’t get a full night’s sleep, your body can fully recover from the activities of the day, contributing to more pain. So what came first, the chronic pain or the insomnia?

Related source: Health.com