Category: health

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Guest Post: 3 Ways To Better Manage Sports Pain

Disclaimer: this post is sponsored content.

As an endurance athlete, you need to learn to manage pain. Pain is a normal part in the lives of people, who love sports.

However, as an athlete you need to practice the saying “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” This is the primary reason why endurance athletes last long compared with other people who can’t even run a mile. Experts believe that it’s their ability to cope with pain, physically and psychologically.

So why do athletes have better tolerance for pain? A research by the University of Heidelberg in Germany found that athletes stand pain better than non-athletes. The researchers believed that it’s their commitment to regular physical activity that improved their ability to bear pain.

The study found that athletes can deal with chronic pain better. They can stand pain for longer duration because their training has helped them to develop the coping skills they need.

Athletes are often exposed in intense psychological and physical pain, especially before and during the competitions. They deal with pain better than the non-athletes because they know how to apply the pain coping mechanisms that would help them win in the competitions.

Aside from exercise to alleviate pain, the researchers are looking into the power of meditation. Later on, this may help people struggling with chronic pain.

Whether you are an athlete or not, practice these mental strategies that can help you bear pain better:

  • Do the self-talk.

“Mind over matter.” When you tell your brain to focus on the pain, you will surely stop during the game. The best way to fight the pain, especially when you feel that you want to give up in the middle of the competition is to use the rhythmic cognitive behavior. It’s easy to apply this because you just have to say a certain mantra or word that applies to you. For instance, you can say “power,” “fast,” “calm” repeatedly to encourage yourself to go on than to focus on the pain. You can also count from 1 to 10 and begin it again after every step, stride or ride you do. It’s one easy way to divert your mind from telling you that you need to stop because of the pain.

  • Believe that pain will pass.

When the pain starts to consume you during the competition or trainings, your emotions may begin to surface. Those emotions are sending messages telling you to either ask for help, slow down or you need to drink. Don’t ignore those emotions and try to understand what the important message it is telling you. The fastest way to manage this difficult emotion at the height of a competition is to stop your movements. During this time, you need to calm yourself to put an end to this emotion. You need to say a powerful mantra to remind yourself that you are in control of everything. Convince yourself that the pain is just temporary and it will not last.

  • Accept what’s there.

What you’re expecting on the day of your training or competition has something to do with how you will perceive pain. When you begin to think that you can handle the pain that you may be experiencing later during the race will change how you will handle it.

What you feed your brain is what you’re going to believe in. For instance, you will think that “It was the slippery road that caused my injury.” As an endurance athlete, it will help you if you will begin to have less expectations. You should be ready for whatever will happen later and believe that you can handle anything, even facing pain.

 

Frances Hamilton loves writing about developing mental skills as a way to enhance the physical strength. She is a devoted Christian, swimmer and speaker as well as resident counsellor at rehabcenters.com.

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Introducing the FAT Project

Do you like transformation stories (as in, whole body makeovers/big weight loss success stories)? I confess, they are generally not my thing, but in this case, I’ll make an exception, maybe because the end goal of this one is to become an Olympic distance (not in the actual Olympic Games, mind you), triathlete, and because it’s a friend.





Paul McIntyre Royston named his weight-loss effort/triathlon dream the FAT Project not to invoke the pejorative use of the word FAT… it’s actually an acronym for Food Addict to Triathlete.

One of the last times I saw Paul in person was the Wasaga Triathlon in 2008 (sadly, I don’t have a recap of that race as I wasn’t blogging regularly yet), where he completed their Try-A-Tri event of a 375 m swim, a 10 km bike and a 2.5 km run.  He’d spent the summer getting healthier, and completing the race was the culmination of that effort.  Sadly, the results didn’t stick, which can be a problem in getting healthy for any of us.

He’s now over 400 lbs, living in Calgary with his wife and 3 daughters, but this time, he’s building a village, or at least surrounding himself with a team.  His weight loss efforts will be medically supervised by a doctor, dietician and nutritionist.  He’s also documenting everything through a website, with a PR firm and Film company on board to capture the big milestones on his journey.  And of course, putting his message out there helps with accountability, so there’s a full on social media campaign too, see below.

Website
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube

I’m really excited to be able to follow Paul on his journey – I think it’s going to be uplifting and a lot of fun, and I’ll hope you’ll join me in cheering him on!

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What You Don’t Know About Sleep

Happy New Year! No year-in-review posts, no resolutions/goals posts, just something I’ve wanted to write about for a while, but it’s taken some time to put the whole post together. Read on, if sleep is important to you, especially if you are or know a snorer.

I used to be an insomniac.  Insomnia can take many forms, but for me, it used to be hardest getting to sleep.  When I was a kid, my parents used to try to coach me to think happy thoughts, but little boys’ happy thoughts tend to be fairly exciting, not so much relaxing (I think I can see a pattern with Shark Boy’s night-time routine).  When I was older, I could easily let my mind race.


Nowadays, I don’t really have that problem anymore.  I’m able to think of relaxing thoughts, and frankly, I’m exhausted enough at the end of the average day that I can just drift off – happy thoughts are more like being on a hammock at the beach, for example.  I did learn a lot about good sleep hygiene in the interim though, and I’d consider myself about as big an expert as a layperson without formal training or certification can be.  Some top tips for higher-quality sleep include:


  • Keep the room as dark as possible.  Our body’s hormonal releases are triggered by light, so night lights, street lights shining in from the window, etc. can all interfere with that.  We have opaque black-out blinds in the master bedroom and the Lightning Kid’s room.
  • Similarly, try not to engage in any screen time immediately before bed – TV, computers, or even smartphone screens’ light in your eyes puts your brain in the wrong state for sleeping.  Reading is better, if you use an e-reader, try to find a night-mode where the ‘paper’ is black and the letters are white for less light into your eyes.  I once found a way to do this on my Kobo, but a software upgrade reverted it.
  • In fact, make sure your bed is only used for sleeping (and maybe one other thing).  TV in the bedroom is a definite and obvious no-no, but overall, the idea is to use Pavlovian conditioning to get your mind and body to equate being in that space with sleeping, and nothing else.
  • A hot bath is relaxing and appealing before bed, but if it’s too hot, it can make falling asleep difficult.  I’m a little guilty of this one sometimes.
  • Caffeine and alcohol can interfere with the body’s rhythms, so limit your intake.



Obviously all of these have to be varied according to personal taste, I really only include them here to show that I’ve done my homework when it comes to a good night’s sleep.  


I’ve been a snorer for most of my adult life.  In January of 2014, things got a lot worse, in that it got so loud that my wife and I couldn’t sleep in the same room anymore.  I found an app called Snorelab and downloaded it to my iPad.  I wear a mouth-guard to prevent teeth grinding  (known as bruxism), and the other issue I started having was waking up with a dry mouth.  I mean, incredibly dry.  It felt like I’d spent a week in the Sahara.  So I tried playing with having a glass of water nearby to stay hydrated, running a humidifier in the room, and using a mouth spray to fight the dryness.  I also tracked the effect of my snoring.


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I managed to reach “Epic” levels of loudness, and it put me in the top few percent of snorers.  Between that and the dryness of mouth, it was time to book a sleep study.  


I didn’t get an appointment till July of 2014, and when I did, I found the experience to be not too unpleasant.  Yes, I did have to get wired up in weird ways with something like 20 electrode pads all over my body, including my head and face, torso and legs.  While I was lying down, they had to do various calibrations where I had to move (or not move) and breathe (or hold my breath) in various ways.  It also meant having to call for help when I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night to get unhooked from the wires.


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It took a few weeks to get the results, but when I sat down with the doctor at the sleep clinic I was diagnosed with a mild obstructive sleep apnea (which gets severe when supine, i.e on my back).  This means my breathing gets disrupted while sleeping, and to fight this, my body wakes itself (not always to the point of consciousness necessarily).  With these arousals (numbering close to 40 in total), there is also (in my case) “mild periodic leg movement disorder”, but more importantly, it reduces the quality of sleep and puts undue strain on my heart while my oxygen levels dip below 90% which is a sort of safety threshold.


  1. The first issue is important, because we all know that sleep is important and we all struggle to get enough in terms of quantity, but if the quality is poor, what’s the point?  Even on nights where I seemed to get plenty of sleep, I’d wake up tired.
  2. I don’t worry about my heart too much since there aren’t too many issues with it from a hereditary perspective and the fact that I get lots of cardio-vascular exercise, but I do think about all the times I read about heart-attacks in marathons and triathlons.  The victims are usually in good shape, long-time endurance athletes, so what happens? The blame is usually put on some undiagnosed heart-defect.  I searched Dr. Larry Creswell’s Athlete’s Heart website and though he has some articles about athlete’s sudden cardiac death, I didn’t find much linking obstructive sleep apnea to these kinds of problems.  Still, it can’t be a good thing to keep on living with it.


I was hoping that the solution could be simple; a mouth guard that would alter the position of my mouth.  I already wear one for the teeth grinding, so no problem!  The solutions presented were:


  1. Surgery.  Very little chance of success.
  2. Mouth guard.  Chance of success was also not high and the cost would be in the thousands of dollars, not covered by the Ontario Health Care.
  3. A CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine.  This has the highest success rate, and the Ontario government covers 75% of the cost.


I didn’t like idea of the machine as I thought it would restrict my freedoms (travel, camping, or even the ability to switch beds spontaneously), but I’d heard from friend (who suffers from a more severe obstructive apnea) that sleeping with one had been life changing and theree was a night and day difference in the quality of sleep he enjoyed.  Between that, the cost and the chance of success I pretty much had to give the CPAP a try.  I was signed up for a free trial for a month (which ended up turning into 6 weeks).


How the machine works is that it increases the air pressure in my airway inflating it a like a balloon a bit, so that the passageway doesn’t collapse and block the travel of air going in and out.  The machine needs to be loaded with distilled water (which humidifies the air going in), and I wear a mask over my nose.  While this is better than something covering my whole face, I still can’t really open my mouth while it’s running or it won’t function properly – and I can’t talk very well as the difference in air pressure affects my ability to get words out – it’s like a mild form of gagging.  Still, it’s comfortable enough when my mouth is closed, and the mask has utterly failed to frighten my children when they’ve seen me wearing it.  I’m actually able to fall asleep wearing it without problems, but I’ve noticed that getting back to sleep once I’ve gotten up due to one of the Lightning Kid’s wake-ups is harder.  It’s really a matter of habit.  I do seem to be better rested when I sleep with the machine, but it’s marginal, not a night-and-day difference.


In October, I went in for another sleep study while using a CPAP machine.  The machine I had trialled was actually an APAP machine; it automatically varies the air pressure during the night, to what is needed, rather than be set to one constant pressure.  The readings from the machine were downloaded to a memory card which I turned in before my second sleep study.  It was found I could get by with a constant pressure.  

For the second study I managed to fall asleep in 9 minutes (it took 13 the first time) and I had 19 awakenings, no breathing interruptions nor did my oxygen saturation sink below 95%.  I should also mention that using the mask eliminates my snoring and only makes a light, white noise that my wife doesn’t seem to mind.
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Youth Are More Active Than You Think…

King of the Playground

The news has been getting me down lately.  I really don’t know how to fix terrorism or the sorry state of our culture when it comes to gender roles etc.  But I have seen a few things this week that make me want to refute claims that our youth are overly sedentary and our digital society is ruining how they socialize.

We’ve had a nice Indian Summer going on here, and when I’ve gotten home from work, the easiest way to get the kids out of my wife’s hair while she prepares dinner is to head out the back door, through the backyard, to a local playground.  If you’ve been reading this blog at all before today, it should come as no surprise that we get active outside as a family; at least half of this year’s posts follow that theme.

My kids, however, are very young – too young for cellphones, tablets, video games or even most television.  They don’t necessarily represent (even demographically) the overall problem that gets reported in the media.

On Tuesday, I was at the park with the Lightning Kid; Shark Boy is still getting used to full school days without naps, and was taking it easy at home.  I saw some pre-teen boys doing some calisthenics.  I found it puzzling, because there didn’t seem to be a real leader or purpose to their exercises, but I was still glad to see young people being active.  The Lightning Kid and I played our little game of climbing up the playground and going down the slide for a while before we got called to dinner, but on the way back, I noticed their exercises had progressed to martial arts kicks.  I started to think they might be doing some kind of pretend ninja training… then I saw one of the kids consult a tablet. They were obviously following some kind of Youtube workout/training video!  Score one for the digital age.

Yesterday, I took the Lightning Kid to the playground again, and I got a call that Shark Boy wanted to join us.  He ran out of the backyard and I made sure he got to the park.  Once we started climbing the structure, we found we had to share it with some teenagers (I’d put them around 14 – definitely a little older than Tuesdays’ kids).  They were playing Manhunt/Manhunter or something – basically a combination of tag/hide and seek that involved teamwork.  I don’t need to figure out the details – I played games like that as a kid too, and rules always vary from region to region and generation to generation.  The point is, they were breathlessly sprinting, climbing, trash-talking etc. not cyber-bullying or sexting, or any of the other things we worry about teenagers getting up to.

Technology has a way of reshaping our culture for better and for worse, but the important thing to remember is that it usually fragments the way we spend our time rather than making wholesale replacements – kids are playing outside AND playing video games, for example.  It’s not always black/white/either/or out there.

Have you seen any examples of kids engaging in traditional play, or even re-interpreting it for the modern age?

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How Much Does a Vasectomy Hurt?


I’m a little ambivalent about writing about this, as it is a quite private matter, but if my tale helps quell the nerves of someone who is considering it, then it will be worth the effort.

I had a vasectomy.  Don’t worry, this post won’t have any pictures – and if you feel like skipping out on reading the rest, I totally understand, but please come back next time!  My wife and I have the family we want; we’re not looking to add anymore Scoundrels of Steel.  Vasectomy was the best way for us to implement this decision.

Before I describe the experience, I need to hop on the soapbox for a bit.  While I do have several friends who have gotten “the snip”, some of the background feedback I was picking up was that the procedure is emasculating.  When doing the referral, my family doctor couldn’t stop congratulating me; you see, in the area around her practice, the trend seemed to be that husbands were pressuring their wives to get their “tubes tied” (tubal ligation).  If you ask me, (and yes this is based in some out-dated conceptions of masculinity), there’s nothing less manly than putting your woman in a greater danger than you’re willing to face yourself.  Tubal ligation is an invasive surgical procedure; vasectomy is not.  I’d hate to see what these guys if they ever ran into a bear or something, they’d probably feed their wives to it while running away screaming.  While there may be reasons to want to be fertile down the road, none of them apply to me, and like David Eddie says, a vasectomy is “a terrific gesture of monogamy”.

Dismount from soapbox.

I had heard about ‘Gentle Vasectomy’ being done in Peterborough, unfortunately, the doctor who performed them retired without finding anyone to take over his practice.  I did find So Simple Vasectomy in Oakville, which was closer anyway.  The procedure has an extra cost not covered by the health care system, but I figured the lessened pain and shortened recovery time was worth a few bucks.

I’m a little ambivalent about writing about this, as it is a quite private matter, but if my tale helps quell the nerves of someone who is considering it, then it will be worth the effort.
I had a vasectomy.  Don’t worry, this post won’t have any pictures – and if you feel like skipping out on reading the rest, I totally understand, but please come back next time!  My wife and I have the family we want; we’re not looking to add anymore Scoundrels of Steel.  Vasectomy was the best way for us to implement this decision.
Before I describe the experience, I need to hop on the soapbox for a bit.  While I do have several friends who have gotten “the snip”, some of the background feedback I was picking up was that the procedure is emasculating.  When doing the referral, my family doctor couldn’t stop congratulating me; you see, in the area around her practice, the trend seemed to be that husbands were pressuring their wives to get their “tubes tied” (tubal ligation).  If you ask me, (and yes this is based in some out-dated conceptions of masculinity), there’s nothing less manly than putting your woman in a greater danger than you’re willing to face yourself.  Tubal ligation is an invasive surgical procedure; vasectomy is not.  I’d hate to see what these guys if they ever ran into a bear or something, they’d probably feed their wives to it while running away screaming.  While there may be reasons to want to be fertile down the road, none of them apply to me, and like David Eddie says, a vasectomy is “a terrific gesture of monogamy”.
Dismount from soapbox.
I had heard about ‘Gentle Vasectomy’ being done in Peterborough, unfortunately, the doctor who performed them retired without finding anyone to take over his practice.  I did find So Simple Vasectomy in Oakville, which was closer anyway.  The procedure has an extra cost not covered by the health care system, but I figured the lessened pain and shortened recovery time was worth a few bucks.


The appointment was booked for a few days after getting back from Germany (I called sometime the previous November).  Leading up to the big day I hadn’t done much reading; I think I use denial way too much – as I write this, I’m acting like the first days of school won’t have any significant impact on our family life.  I’m a little unsure about going into too much detail, but the instructions were to… *ahem* shave myself, “as [I] would shave [my] face”.  I guess they didn’t know how sloppy I am with getting every single face whisker.  The good news is that was probably the scariest part of the whole procedure.

On the day of the appointment, I was given a valium (by my choice) for my nerves, and I nodded off in the waiting room.  The doctor explained that at times I would experience pain like being kicked in the junk (he compared it to when my kids jump in my lap too aggressively), but it was closer to being pressed… we used to call it the ‘gas pedal’ when I was a kid (if you didn’t know, boyhood is basically the life of a gladiator).  I went home basically pain-free.

I had to refrain from exercise or even lifting the kids for the next week, which sucked.  I did have days where I felt ‘tender’ – as if having experienced a kick earlier that day.  I think I used a painkiller (ibuprofen) once, and ice 2-3 times.  Using ice down there is no fun, so I never lasted too long with it.  I missed Band On The Run, which I had been signed up for, but I started exercising the week after no problem

Best of all, I was riding a bike, which was what I was most nervous about.  In a couple of weeks, I have a date with a plastic cup to confirm that the procedure worked.  I hope this has been informative to some of you, if there’s anything you felt I didn’t cover, you could email me (link is on the page), or look at the link for So Simple Vasectomy as they have a FAQ page.  I’ll be back soon with more endurance sport, I promise.