Beat The Catch-22 Of Exercise Benefits!

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

No question/request too big or small 😎

❝How to get around the catch 22 of exercise will make you feel better but you need to be motivated, not in pain, etc to do it? I don’t want to just give up❞

It sure can be a challenge! But there are indeed ways through it.

Let’s tackle it in two parts…

Dealing with motivation issues

Starting at the deep end, motivation issues can be really bad, in cases such as depression.

Our “101” article about that is here: The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← it’s about how to get even the tiniest crumb of motivation in the first place, which for many people can be a serious barrier to healthy living even in the very broadest sense, whence the neologism “bedrotting” that’s popular amongst Gen-Z.

If things aren’t quite that dire for you but it is still difficult to find motivation in the broadest sense, then check out: Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety ← this one’s more about “snowballing” the crumb of motivation that you already have, to make it into something larger and more sustainable.

We also have a trifecta of articles pertaining to exercise-motivation-specific considerations, and making them resilient to being interrupted by problems:

• Escape Self-Sabotage
• How To Plan For The Unplannable ← so those disruptions can’t disrupt us so much!
• How To Keep On Keeping On For Long-Term Health Goals

For a much more in-depth treatment of the topic, you might also enjoy this book that we reviewed:

I Will Make You Passionate About Exercise – by Bevan Eyles

Dealing with pain

With pain, often a big problem is that pain in one body part results in us changing what we do and/or overcompensating in some other body part, which results in “referred pain” in the other body part.

And yes, this can then result in the same thing elsewhere, i.e. the referred pain in the second body part causes us to change what we do and/or overcompensate in a third body part, which means we now get pain there as well, and so on, like a dastardly case of dominoes.

You can read more about that (and how to avoid it), here: Stop Pain Spreading

Often, the pain that starts this all off is a joint pain:

• Because joint pain is very common, and increasingly common as we get older
• Because joint pain is inextricably related to movement and/or lack thereof, i.e. exercise and/or inactivity

This is perhaps the biggest catch-22 on the “pain and exercise” side of things, so we did a main feature on it here:

When Bad Joints Stop You From Exercising (5 Things To Change)

You might also be wondering: Is It Beneficial To Tape Joints For Workouts? ← the short answer is “no”

Lastly, “little and often” is almost always best when it comes to exercising in the context of pain management, per a recent systematic umbrella review and meta-meta-analysis of 157 systematic reviews comprising 2,736 randomized controlled trials and 221,279 participants:

❝Importantly, we found that more exercise wasn’t necessarily better. In fact, shorter-duration and lower-intensity programs showed greater reductions in pain, suggesting people may not need to exercise harder or for longer to experience meaningful benefits.❞

~ Dr. Carol Maher

Source: The effect of exercise on clinical pain: a systematic umbrella review and meta-meta-analysis

Take care!