Listen to your body and adhere to Caroline Hennigan’s Pain Scale when training and recovering from an injury - rest is not the answer, but being sensible most certainly is!

Our bodies are incredibly intelligent machines, and, as our physiotherapist Caroline Hennigan explains, it has all the answers when we are asking ourselves - how hard can I push my body in training or after an injury?

The body’s tissue, be it muscle, tendon, ligament or bone, has a limit – a level of stress that it can withstand before it becomes painful, alerting us to the potential for damage, or to it already happening.

Caroline often sees patients at the clinic who, when describing the onset of a problem, they recall being involved in an activity when they felt a twinge. They continued pushing, and the twinge became a more definite pain, and the familiar phrase is uttered: “I know I should have stopped, but I didn’t!” The limit of the tissue has been exceeded and injury has occurred.



In a typical boom or bust fashion, having sustained an injury, many patients rest in a bid to allow the body to heal and recover.

However, and this is really important to emphasise:

Resting an injury doesn’t usually bring about the desired effect of healing!

Either A) The pain persists
or B) the pain resolves itself

But! The pain often returns once normal activity is resumed - and the patient ends up at the clinic boiling over with frustration!

The simple diagram below shows a colour coded pain scale, where 0 is no pain, and 10 is the most severe pain. It can be used to evaluate what’s happening to your body, either during a training session or during a period of recovery.



Tissue is designed to withstand stress.

In the Green Zone the tissue can withstand a degree of stress that results in discomfort and mild pain without significant consequence.

However, in the Orange Zone, this is your body’s warning system, and here you will be experiencing moderate pain, because you are nearing your tissues limit.

At the other end of the scale, in the Red Zone, you will feel severe pain, as the stress you have put your body under has exceeded your limit and tissue damage will have occurred. The amount of pain you feel forces you to stop.

Interestingly, during a period of recovery, rest needs to be relative rather than total.

So, although you need to avoid provoking your symptoms to some degree (staying out of the orange and red zones), total rest is not beneficial. Medical research has shown that for optimal healing, some stress is necessary. This stimulates the recovery process and aids the restoration of the structure of the cells within the tissue that gives it the ability to withstand stress in the first place. The tissue will gradually adapt to meet the demands placed on it.

Therefore, if you are coming back from an injury and find you can run for four miles with pain that only scores 2/10 (Green Zone), then go ahead. This level of stress is therapeutically beneficial and will help maintain your sanity.

However, if you do your usual run of six miles and your pain level reaches 7/10, then you are in the Red Zone, and should avoid this level of stress for the time being.



For example, Caroline’s young son recently complained of a sore leg, and explained how and why he thought it was sore: “Well mummy, I did loads of sport yesterday, and my heart and lungs felt great but I think I might have exceeded my leg’s limit!” In answer to Caroline’s question as to what he thought he should do about it, he said would ride his bike all day instead of walking and running. The perfect solution, allowing some stress to the leg to stimulate the recovery process, but not too much!

As recovery progresses, the symptom response to training, and the way the body responds to different amounts of training load and stress will change too, and it can begin to do more.

Listen to your body – it has all the answers!