Research project No pain, no gain – meanings of pain for recreational athletes: negative, positive, both?
No pain no gain is a popular motto in connection with training. Besides negative pain from injuries it seems that there is such a thing as good pain. Something you even should aim at during exercise and that allegedly contributes to a healthier life
When the researcher and health educator Pelle Pelters saw an advertising campaign from a gym chain to give exercise pain away as a Christmas present it raised a question. What is it about pain that is so pleasurable that we should even give it away?
It also sparked the idea to conduct this study in which 30 gym-goers of all ages and genders will be interviewed about their views on pain in connection with exercise.
The study aims at understanding the meaning of pain for recreational athletes as exemplified by gym-users. The following research questions will be focused:
- What kinds of pain do gym-users perceive?
- What functions do gym-users ascribe to pain, with regard to exercise and their self-understanding as ‘someone who exercises’
- How are different kinds of pain related to one another in gym-users’ accounts?
Project description
Relevance and importance to sports
Exercising is considered crucial for promoting health and preventing disease. For at least a decade, a considerable part of organized recreational sports has been directed to promoting health in a wider sense. However, approximately 20 percent of the Swedish population rarely or never exercise, imparting significance to questions about beneficial conditions for making people exercise. These questions are usually addressed with regard to personal motivations to actually exercise.
The proposed study contributes to this field but focuses on exercising’s implicit conditions by investigating the subjective meaning of pain for active recreational athletes who exercise at the gym as a popular place for exercising. This focus is motivated by the assumption that understandings of pain have the potential to contribute to normative expectations about exercising as only leading to gain when being painful. These expectations may guide behavior by affecting individual decisions for or against exercise as they may shape ideas about the phenomenon people make motivated decisions about, i.e. exercise.
Specific goals and purpose of the project
At gyms as present-day fitness temples and valid examples of recreational sports, pain might potentially be regarded as an ordeal or an appeal, depending on its perception as a signifier of doing right, in terms of pushing limits, based on the mantra no pain, no gain, or wrong, in terms of overstraining.
The study aims at understanding the explicit and implicit meaning of pain for active gym-users as examples of recreational athletes, in order to understand what pain and its consequences represent in the gym context, how pain is related to understanding exercise and how it may work as a constructing element of ‘the true, fit exerciser’ as an identity construction.
Therefore, the following research questions will be focused:
- What kinds of pain do recreational athletes perceive?
- What functions do gym-users ascribe to pain, with regard to exercise and their self-understanding as ‘someone who exercises’
- How are different kinds of pain related to one another in gym-users accounts?
From a perspective that focuses on the self-evident normality, a so-called norm-critical perspective, investigating the meaning that pain offers as such and as a means of identity construction is presumed to elucidate a part of the normative foundation of exercise.
This foundation is assumed to be connected to people’s motivation to engage in exercising as it may frame what is assessed as ‘doing exercise right’ and being ‘a true, fit exerciser’.
Gaining knowledge about potential normative guidelines is deemed a precondition to actively engage with them in exercise settings or other types of health education. This is the ultimate aim of norm-critical education and may in the long run mitigate normative barriers for exercising.
Project plan No pain no gain with references (206 Kb)
Project members
Project managers
Pelle Pelters
Senior lecturer
