To the long list of the benefits of physical activity, researchers have just added one more thing: a greater ability to handle pain.
A recent study published in the journal PLOS One found that regular exercise is an effective way to reduce or prevent chronic pain without the use of medication.
“The main takeaway is that engaging in habitual physical activity in your leisure time seems to be connected with your pain tolerance — the more active you are, the higher your tolerance is likely to be,” Anders Pedersen Årnes, the lead author from the University Hospital of North Norway, told Fox News Digital in an email.
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The study was repeated twice, seven to eight years apart.
The higher the total activity levels, the greater the person’s pain tolerance.
“Secondly, there were indications that both total amount of physical activity over time, as well as the direction of change in activity level over time, [impacts] how high pain tolerance is,” Årnes said.
The higher the total activity levels, the greater the person’s pain tolerance.
“We found large effects for the most active versus the least active participants — close to 60 seconds tolerance on average for the sedentary group versus above 80 seconds tolerance for the most active participants,” Årnes said.
Another surprise was that no difference was seen between women and men.
“We would not use these results to predict pain tolerance for small, clinical subpopulations,” he said.
This wasn’t the first research to examine the relationship between exercise and pain tolerance.
“Increasing your physical activity level could do you a lot of good.”
And in 2020, an Australian study published in the journal BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders evaluated nearly 600 participants who suffered from chronic musculoskeletal pain.
Those who did regular aerobic physical activity, including walking or cycling, experienced higher pain thresholds, researchers from Monash University found.
“The most important thing is that you do something — and increasing your physical activity level could do you a lot of good.”
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During 2021, nearly 21% of U.S. adults (51.6 million people) experienced chronic pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).