PAIN ≠ DISCOMFORT
Every hard workout eventually asks you a question.
Your legs are burning. Your lungs are on fire. Your brain is negotiating — slow down, break it up, you're done. And in that moment, everything you feel gets lumped under one word: pain.
But not everything that hurts is pain. And learning the difference might be the most useful skill we coach.
PAIN IS AN ALARM. DISCOMFORT IS INFORMATION.
Pain is your body's protective system doing its job. Real pain — the kind we stop for — tends to be sharp, sudden, and specific. It shows up in a joint instead of a muscle. It changes how you move. It arrives with a pop, a tweak, a wrongness you can point at with one finger.
Discomfort is different. Discomfort is the diffuse burn of working muscles, legs that feel like concrete, a heart rate you can hear in your ears. It's global, not local. And here's the tell: it fades within minutes of stopping. Damage doesn't switch off like that. Discomfort does.
One protects you. The other changes you.
WHAT THE SCIENCE ACTUALLY SAYS
Modern pain science has moved past the idea that pain is a direct readout of damage. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as an experience associated with — or merely resembling — tissue damage, and is explicit that pain and the signals traveling from your tissues are two different things. Pain researcher Lorimer Moseley puts it plainly: pain is the brain's marker of the perceived need to protect the body. It's an opinion your brain forms, using the signals it gets — plus your expectations, your stress, your history, and what you believe is happening.
That opinion can be loud and wrong. In one finding from exercise science, the famous “burn” isn't caused by any single chemical in the muscle. Researchers found it takes a combination of metabolites — produced when you work hard — to trip the sensors that create that burning, aching fatigue. Any one of them alone does nothing. And the old villain, lactic acid? Cleared. Lactate production actually retards acidosis rather than causing it. The burn is real. It just isn't damage.
Your brain tricks you in the other direction, too:
CrossFit's own Journal took this up back in 2015. In “Mind Over Muscle Ups,” Hilary Achauer talked with scientists and meditation experts about how athletes rise above burning discomfort — her example is Fran: burning quads and forearms, and the bar going down because the pain felt like too much. What they told her matches everything above: pain is an experience your brain builds, where your attention goes changes how loud it gets, and your relationship to the signal can be trained like anything else you train.
There's even a theory, Tim Noakes' “central governor,” that the brain paces you conservatively to protect you from yourself. It's debated — plenty of scientists push back on it — but anyone who has ever found a gear they “didn't have” in the final minute of a workout knows the feeling it's describing: you were never actually empty. You were being managed.
David Goggins built a philosophy on that exact feeling. His “40% Rule,” from his book Can't Hurt Me: when your mind tells you you're done, you're only at 40% of what your body is capable of — there's 60% still in the tank. Is 40% a measured number? No. It's one man's rule of thumb, earned the hard way, not a lab result. But as a question to ask yourself mid-workout — am I actually done, or is my brain just negotiating? — it's hard to beat.
And the soreness tomorrow? Delayed-onset muscle soreness peaks 24–72 hours after unaccustomed work, and research shows muscle damage itself doesn't drive muscle growth. Soreness is not a scorecard. It's just a receipt — and sometimes not even for the workout you think.
HOW WE COACH IT AT SWITCHBACK
This is why your coaches ask questions instead of just yelling “push.”
When someone stops mid-workout, the first question is: where, and what does it feel like?
The skill isn't ignoring your body. The skill is interpreting it. Pain gets obedience. Discomfort gets negotiation.
FROM JESSIE
As an athlete:
I know the difference, but when the going gets tough I try to remind myself that all the discomfort will be gone within a few minutes of the workout ending. I did a lot of ‘buy-in’ work just to get to the uncomfortable part, and that's where the gains begin, and the W happens when you're competing. I then tell myself to go ahead and pick up the bar, jump up to the rings, or drop to the floor for the next burpee and just keep moving.
As a coach:
From a coaching perspective, I want people to seek the discomfort, and when they find it, lean into it and press harder. That's why pacing and strategy are so important. If you rush in blindly, not knowing which round or movement or when in the workout the real suffering will be, you shoot out of the gate too hot, or simply don't warm up enough, you get caught off guard. And the body and brain are both in shock and go into panic mode. If we can rev it up, and start flirting with that red line closer to the end of the workout, we can really push into the growth zone.
THE QUESTION
So in your next workout, when it starts talking to you, ask: is this pain — or is this discomfort?
Your answer decides what happens next.
Keep Climbing
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