PAINKILLER

One particular dilemma that many inexperienced fighters are often faced with during a bout is the control of “pain management” under stress.

This first becomes apparent to a novice fighter when facing an unpredictable opponent whom they’ve never fought before. This opponent, having more experience, is elusive and is able to score it will upon the vulnerable areas of your body, the repeated punishment causes you to lose your composure as the pain becomes too uncomfortable for you to bear longer.

I’ve personally witnessed dozens of amateur fighters in both Boxing & Martial Arts that, even though sufficiently trained and in good physical condition, literally fall apart once they receive a minimal level of pain-causing abuse in the middle of a competition, mainly because their trainers have not made their students properly aware of the physiological effects of certain levels of pain.

Gaining a better understanding of the limits of your body’s parameters of pain management and learning to maintain control of its effects on your nervous system may actually become the deciding factor in a fight!

One of the only known methods of learning to sufficiently control pain is to simply expose oneself to it more often. This does not have to be as masochistic as it might sound…the desired results can eventually be achieved by controlled experimentation during regular training sessions with the help of a trusted partner.

You may try having your training partners apply slow and steady pressure to basic joint-locks until the pain is too great for you to bear any longer, thus testing your ability to resist its effects.

Proper pain management can be developed through many similar training drills…

Like extreme stretching, which is often reported to be the least favorite and most painful part of many martial artists’ training routines, bringing on such pain upon oneself is fairly difficult to bear until the body’s muscles and tendons are limbered up. However, by doing so, most athletes report that, at a certain point, it does become easier to do and produces a greater range of motion and flexibility; the resistance to pain slowly begins to dissolve. Advanced stretching is a good way to gage and learn to better control the effects of pain to your brains neuron-receptors.

There are martial artists in places around the world that train like extremists!

For example; in certain regions of Thailand there are entire villages devoted to raising and developing generations of Muay-Thai fighters. There, all young students are forcefully instructed to kick extremely resistant bamboo trees and other hard objects, until their shins bleed, for hours a day or else they got no dinner that evening. To have them learn how to keep better focus and concentration while blocking out the pain, there are well-trained Filipino Stick-Fighting instructors who often drill their students so intensely, until their hands become blistered and bloody. Although certainly brutal, all of this affords the deadening of any instantly disabling pain stimulus

Every year in Amsterdam, tourists are astounded by a portion of the “sadistic circus” of tattooed and overly-pierced cultural performers, suspending themselves by their genitals on hooks and chains, along the some of the seedier streets in the Red Light District…now, that’s extreme! It seems there are many ways to prepare for the in evident pain of martial arts training and other unrelated environments where pain is a key element.

Becoming more familiar with pain’s effects on your own nervous system will eventually bring a higher level of comfort to it and may even save you in a fight!