Episode 405 - The Value of Pain
On this episode, Jeremy talks about the one thing that we feel whenever we have good training, the value of pain.
The Value of Pain - Episode 405
Pain gives us experiences that we remember for the rest of our lives. Pain provides us value in our training so we would learn how we avoid it as we grow and progress as martial artists. On today's episode, Jeremy talks about the value of pain in our training, how is it a wonderful educator and motivator. Listen to this episode to learn more!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below or download here.Jeremy Lesniak:Good day everyone, welcome. This is whistlekick martial arts radio episode 405. Today were talking about pain and how pain can serve us as martial artists my names are realistic on your host on the show and the founder of whistlekick and a guy who works through the pain because I love the martial arts. Been training my whole life and it's really defined who I am and now I get to share what I’ve learned with all of you and it gives me the opportunity to bring on wonderful amazing guests. We put out an interview episode once a week and then on Thursdays we have some kind of a topic. Sometimes and by myself as I am today, sometimes we have a guest talk about that topic and you can learn more find all the other episodes we do at whistlekickmartialartsradio.com and that's where you can also find the show notes, sign up for the newsletter and just check out a whole bunch more. Now, if you want to see everything that we do it whistlekick, because we do so much more than his podcast head on over to whistlekick.com. If you haven't been there recently, we actually just completely revamped the website. It's faster, most are saying easier to navigate and well, we've got some new products over there because we keep rolling out new stuff because that's what we do here. Were constantly improving, iterating, making things better.Now this topic started as a question from a viewer on 1st cup for those of you who aren't familiar with 1st cup. It's a video morning show that I do weekdays on YouTube, 6:30 AM Eastern of course it's available to watch later on if you're not so inclined, but you can find it on the whistlekick YouTube channel where there's a direct link to the website that we run for it at whistlekick.com. Website is as you might imagine firstcupwithjeremy.com because I like to keep things simple. This question came in and it was in short, how can pain serve us as martial artist. Actually the question is a little bit different but that's the question I'm going to answer because that's what I think is the interesting part.Pain. We all know what pain is, pain is inconvenient. A lot of us would say pain is bad but pain isn't necessarily bad because pain is a wonderful educator. Especially for us as martial artist. If you failed to block correctly sparring with someone and they keep punching you in the head, you will be motivated the block. But if you don't have that input that stress that stimulus of pain maybe you care little bit less. I don't put my hand there, well you want to put your hand there because someone else is putting their hand there and it's unpleasant. Pain of course can manifest in a lot of ways, pain is a type of stress and stress can be physical, it can be emotional, it can be mental. Pain comes in all varying degrees ,it can be extreme like when you miss someone punching you in the face, you don't block it, take a shot to the orbital or the nose. Those stink, that hurts. Or it can be much later where you clash shins with someone. Or maybe they pop you in the rib, that's not nearly as bad you'll be okay, maybe walk funny for a couple days. But really at the end of the day, pain is one of the best teachers we have. Whether it's the actual pain or the idea of the pain, there are a lot of things we take from pain and I don't think that we talk about enough and I don't think we respected enough as a teacher. So let's talk about pain a little bit more.Pain, hurts. I think we can use those two words synonymously. If something is painful it hurts. It's not just uncomfortable, it's not just something you'd rather not happen, but when we talk about pain it's something that you at the very least have to work through or on the other side of the spectrum, maybe you can't at all. Maybe it's completely debilitating. We've all experienced pain. We've all experienced pain on different ends of the spectrum, maybe not in martial arts but you felt it, you know what pain is. But how often have you considered pain and how it makes you better. When we think about martial arts and pain and the way we use pain, there are really two things that we can think about with respect to how pain helps us. Pain can help us to find our why and pain can help us build experience. If you ever had a sparring match with someone whether that be in your gym, dojo whatever you choose to call it or in competition and you experienced moderate to extreme pain as a result of something that happened, you probably remember that match. If you've been kicked in the head and it knocked you out and you woke up in pain you probably remember that scenario, that event. But I bet you don't remember the sparring matches where there was no pain at least not nearly as high as a percentage of. Pain allows us to connect the things that we do with our memory because inherently we don't want to forget the lessons that we learned from experiencing that pain. The more we experience pain from an action, the less likely we are to undertake that action unless, unless our why, the reason were experiencing that pain a substantial enough to overlook it. When we think about martial arts that are "painful", one of the ones that comes to mind is the way to kyokushin karate sparring is typically trained. Tends to be light on padding and heavy on force. I've never participated in it but I’ve seen plenty of it and it is kind of rough and I enjoy watching it but I imagine that there might be more pain in that style sparring than in your typical point sparring which is what happens in a lot of martial arts schools. If the reason that you've started training in martial arts and you end up at this kyokushin school is just as you want to get in shape and night after night, you come home from the dojo and you're getting popped in the face and it hurts, you are less likely to stick around than if your reason for being there is because you want to be the best kyokushin fighter in the world.When you can correlate your why with the experience of pain, you're far more likely to be able to overcome it to work through it. And let's think of this in a self-defense scenario, if someone's trying to harm you and you get punched in the face, you are much more likely to work through that than if a friend of yours simply walks up and punches you in the face. Your response there is going to be why did you do that? You may even start to cry, you might fall over. There are a lot of things might happen and while all of those things could happen in the self-defense situation, they're less likely because now your why is so much different. You need to save yourself and that matters. I can ramble on more and more but I think you get the point. Pain is a wonderful exposer of your why and it's an amazing teacher that helps us remember what we've experienced. So let's respect pain, let's recognize it for the value that it has and while we should all try to be safe, I don't think we should try to sanitize pain from our lives be it physical or mental or emotional and not entirely anyway.How does pain manifest in your life how do you look at pain with regard to your training I'd love to hear from you. Best place please leave comments episode 405 on whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. Of course you can find the episode on YouTube and you can find all of our social media @whistlekick wherever you go. If you want to leave a private comment ,you can email me at jeremy@whistlekick.com I'd love to hear from you and head on over to whistlekick.com. Use the code podcast15, forgot to say that the intro, podcast15 get you 15% off anything that we've got there. Sign up for the newsletter, check out our other projects like First cup, it's a lot of fun and the show continues to grow. Imagine waking up with me in a bathrobe, drinking your first cup of coffee. Yes it's that weird, but it's a lot of fun and I’ve been enjoying it. It's making me really good at improv. I hope you have a great day, and I’ll see you back here soon, until next time. Train hard smile and have a great day.