Body Improvement and Its Connection with Pain

The most natural way to measure the amount of improvement your body and your mind are doing can be described in one word that no one likes. That word is pain.

There are many forms of pain. We have physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain. Physical pain when exercising is the best way to see how much improvement you are going to see in the next two days. When running, all your muscles will hurt specially the ones you are using. These muscles hurt because they are too weak for the work you ask them to do. They will do it but over their capacity. After the exercise they must rest and repair themselves and make themselves stronger in the future.

Since they were so intensively used, your brain will order them to become stronger and more efficient the next time the muscle cells grow.

Why doesn’t the brain make the whole body stronger? Why do we have to push ourselves to make the brain learn which muscles need improvement?

The brain is smart, but the brain is not a magician that knows which muscles will be needed for which action in the future. If you run, then you need better blood vessels and better bones in your legs and only after the exercise you do your brain will have the necessary data to order the improvement.

The other reason is that resources are very limited. Your brain has few amounts of nutrients and energy to spend, and spending it on body parts that you will not need will have a bad effect on the body parts that do really need those resources. Exercise shows the brain which parts of the body need better resources for the next task.

The reverse of the medal applies too. If you stop exercising your brain will stop paying attention to those muscles and the next time the repair themselves they will be weaker again.

Your body and brain are a perfect match of the life you live.