Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
There is an exercise motto that has permeated all sorts of physical endeavors, like various sport and exercise programs or systems and it is, "No pain, no gain." I got a bit curious about it due to another article, post really, of a martial practitioner who wrote about pain, falling, losing, etc.
Where did it come from, you probably already know and for the few who don't, it came from then exercise guru Jane Fonda. She started using it in her aerobic workout video's in 1982, she would say to catchphrases, first is the no pain, no gain then the second is, "Feel the burn."
Then I began to contemplate these to come to this conclusion, "It depends on the type of pain you are experiencing and it depends on what is causing that burn." No one has really explained about the pain or the burn and how that either is beneficial or not. It matters!
First off, about pain, yes pain is a good teacher because from the moment we are born to even every day life today those things and situations and words we encounter that cause us pain, physical and/or psychological in nature, tend to provide us lessons that we are to learn from, i.e., how to not do what we did, how to not say what we said and how not to allow either physical or psychological weapons to cause us pain. Herein lies the lessons!
Yes, you can imagine that pain has many sides to it and how that pain is triggered and what caused it and how it effects you especially as to health and fitness and longevity matters. A person is able to experience some pains that teach and don’t result in damage to health and fitness. Good pain if you will while bad pain is often about grave harm to either the body or the mind, or worse yet, both.
When I first read the inspiration to write about such catch phrases it was said, “Sometimes you must: hurt in order to know; fall in order to grow; lose in order to gain because most of life’s greatest lessons are learned through pain.” I can agree with it on one level and totally disagree on another.
I can never find an instance in training and practice where you MUST hurt, fall, lose and yet in experiences you will not grow and evolve without the POSSIBILITY of getting hurt, falling down either physically and/or psychologically, and losing something or other in a given situation. In short, such catchphrases need a lot of words and concepts to provide an understanding simply because students don’t yet have a concept in their regard until it is explained, understood and inspiring toward further research and study. Ain’t that the goal of a good catchphrase, meme, aphorism and/or quote?
If you think of it, most of the best lessons learned are so because the person learning had a huge amount of fun during the process in training, practice or application(s). Fun is the best teaching tool one can find and you can imagine that fun while something outside the fun arena tends to hinder it as a lesson because humans tend to avoid non-fun stuff, we don’t want to avoid lessons just because they cause pain without the fun-factor. The more you have fun, the more you learn. The more you learn, the less pain involved, the more you learn.
If you have fun, then you retain the lesson even when pain, loss, and falling, metaphorically speaking or other, happens. Even the very intensity of pain is less when the mind is having fun. I can only guess that if you can make it fun somehow even a fight or a self-protection situation can lesson the pains and arrows of that violent happening. Something to think about.
In the beginning, as you know, students are often starting with a blank slate and as you can imagine our responsibility is to fill in that slate with words, actions, deeds and a lot of fun. Sooner or later we realize that making it fun is not just great for our young adults in the dojo, it is also great for our adults too.
Bibliography (Click the link)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_pain,_no_gain
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