7 Surprising Sources of Cycling Pain

The root cause of what's hurting might not be what you expect

By selene yeager August 31, 2016

 

Illustration by Shutterstock

Sometimes it’s really clear why you’re hurting. Maybe you slid out on your hip and now your hip hurts. Maybe you rode 100 miles after never having gone more than 45 and now your knees, back, neck, and everything else hurts.  Other times, the source of pain is more mysterious. That’s because pain doesn’t actually come from where it hurts: It comes from your brain as a signal to get your attention and protect you. These signals might be protecting an injured body part, like a pulled muscle or inflamed joint. But not always, says Grove Higgins, DC, medical director of Human Performance and Rehabilitation Center of Colorado Springs. 

“Pain gets the message to you that something is wrong. But it doesn’t tell you what or even how major it is,” he says. “Depending on how full your ‘threat bucket’ is, a sliver can feel like a log. Or there can be a log that you barely notice.” 

Threat bucket? Yep. We all have one. It represents the cumulative stress (real or perceived) inside our brain. When it gets too full, the brain sounds the alarm in the form of pain. Here are some sources of pain that may surprise you.

Your Emojis

That's right, your emotions can significantly affect how you process pain. In one study of Swedish airline baggage handlers, the severity of back and shoulder pain they felt and how much it interfered with their job was directly associated with how they rated their job satisfaction.

It’s not just “in your head,” says Higgins. Stress not only creates muscle tension, which can lead to pain, but it also interferes with your brain’s ability to inhibit all the little pain signals it gets during the day. So when you’re stressed, your pain threshold may be lowered. Whether it’s yoga, deep breathing exercises, meditation, using a dayplanner, or making changes in your life situation, lowering your daily stress level can help reduce pain

Scar Tissue

Cumulative trauma through overuse and unresolved tension (like, say, hammering on the bike without adequate recovery) can lead to scar tissue, reduced range of motion and painful trigger points.

“It puts your body in constant fight or flight mode, so there’s always tension,” says Higgins. When there’s chronic tension, there’s often pain, because the brain is trying to get your attention.

In this case, planned recovery, cross-training, foam rolling, and certain massage techniques like active release therapy (ART) can help.

Your Imbalances

Are your quads doing all the pedaling while your glutes are just along for the ride? Are your chest muscles so shortened and your back so weak that you’re in a perpetual aerodynamic tuck, even when you’re walking down the street? It’s easy to develop muscular and postural imbalances in a sport like cycling, where you’re holding one position and calling on just a few primary movers for prolonged periods of time.

“When your thoracic [mid to upper] spine is locked up, it puts strain on your shoulders and even hip flexors,” says Higgins.

Full body stretching and strengthening exercises twice a week can go a long way in preventing pain due to body imbalance. 

Your Sense of Balance

Your body is constantly evaluating where you are in space and keeping you balanced and upright, both on your feet and on your wheels as you ride. This is called your vestibular system (inner ear) function. When it’s dysfunctional, your performance takes a hit, says Higgins.

“Your muscular tension increases and your cycling efficiency suffers, which means you’re working harder than you should, just to keep rolling down the road in a straight line,” he says. Muscling the bike around like this paves the way for pain. 

To test yours: Stand on one foot and move your head left and right at a slow pace. You should be able to do this for 30 seconds without losing balance or touching your other foot to the ground. 

To sharpen it: Perform this “Clock Face Balancing” drill. Stand on your left foot and tap the toes of your right foot at each clock position from 12 to 6 about 2 feet away from your body. Repeat standing on the right foot while tapping counterclockwise from 12 to 6 with your left food. Perform once with eyes open. Then try with eyes closed (and make that your goal).

Your Past

Old cycling injuries have a way of coming back to haunt us, even after they are seemingly fully healed.

For one, injuries often don’t heal “100-percent good as new,” so there can be residual damage which leads to imbalances. In that case, your pain threshold may be lower, because the nerves are more easily triggered and the brain—perhaps overly eager to protect this once-injured area—may be quicker to signal pain. 

To help “reassure” your body that those old injuries are indeed healed, Higgins recommends joint mobility drills—moving the joint or limb through its entire range of available, pain-free motion. “These can be as simple as ankle tilts and knee circles,” says Higgins. “But the power is profound to enhance brain-body connection and reinforce that the problem area is actually okay now,” he says. “If you encounter pain while moving through a range of motion, slow down the movement and reduce the range of motion until there is no pain. Eventually your pain-free range will increase.”

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8 Quick Recovery Tricks to Get You Back on the Bike

Easy ways to bounce back from a hard ride as a stronger and faster cyclist

By selene yeager January 15, 2016

  

Photograph by David Michalczuk/Flickr

Cool Down

Take a few minutes to spin easy after you’ve throttled your legs with a hard ride. The blood vessels in your legs expand while you’re hammering away: Stop abruptly, and the blood just pools down there. This not only makes you lightheaded, but also limits your ability to get fresh nutrient- and oxygen-rich blood in and metabolic waste out—two keys to muscle repair and recovery.

Rub Down

You probably don’t travel with a massage therapist, but you can travel to races and events with a massage stick or mini foam roller—or even a couple of tennis balls and socks. Whatever works, bring it and use it. Massaging your legs helps push out the fluid carrying the waste products of muscle breakdown, and encourages fresh blood to flow in and help rebuild. Research shows that massage following exercise can improve circulation up to 72 hours later. It also breaks up muscle adhesions (knots) that can form from overuse, so your muscles work more smoothly.

 

 Photograph by Thomas MacDonald

Slip on the Socks

The research on how much compression wear improves performance is still fairly equivocal, but studies indicate it can help reduce swelling, fatigue, and muscle soreness after intense exercise. If nothing else, slip on some compression socks. The soleus (calf muscle) is called your second heart because it shepherds blood back to your chest. Compression socks accelerate that process, which in turn improves blood oxygen levels and subsequent recovery.

 

Photograph by Matt Rainey

Drink Up

Dehydration can delay the recovery process because your blood essentially turns to sludge. So stay hydrated as best you can during hard efforts and chase a hard ride or race with a bottle of your favorite recovery drink (and we don’t mean beer… save that for afterwards), be it chocolate milk or something fancier.

Skip the Antioxidants

People used to believe that dosing up on antioxidants like Vitamins C and E could stave off free-radical damage done during hard exercise and accelerate healing. Today, we know the opposite is true: Research shows that during the acute recovery period immediately following a hard workout, antioxidant supplements can counteract the beneficial effects of exercise. By squelching free radicals before your body can react and adapt to them, you keep your muscles from recovering appropriately. In head-to-head comparisons of muscle damage and cell rupture between supplement users and those who go without, those who popped antioxidants appeared to experience more muscle injury and slower recovery. Some studies have found taking C and E after exercise can also counteract the insulin-sensitizing effects of exercise, which is a fancy way of saying your muscles won’t be able to pull in the glycogen and nutrients they need to restock and repair.

Eat More Protein

Branched-chain amino acids found in protein have been widely shown to decrease exercise-induced muscle damage and promote muscle building and repair. You can buy branched-chain amino acid supplements, but eating high-protein foods like beef, chicken, eggs, fish, nuts, and legumes will also get you what you need. Get a high-protein snack, shake, or meal in your system after you crush a ride to kick-start your muscle repair.

 

Carb Up

Hard rides blow out your carbohydrate stores. You body is most primed to replenish them within about 30 minutes of a vigorous workout. Get in a carb-rich snack within that window. Plus, that protein you’re also eating speeds up glycogen restocking as well as muscle repair. A nut butter sandwich or some Greek yogurt and fruit are a couple ideal post-ride recovery foods.

Rest Up

Sleep is healing. Muscle-building hormones surge during shut-eye, while those hormones that break down muscle decrease. Aim for seven to eight hours of sleep a night or sneak in a 30-minute power nap, which research shows can also help lower stress-hormone levels and promote recovery.

It's Time to Say Bye Bye to BMI

Research shows the Body Mass Index doesn’t yield correct answers when it comes to athletes' health

By selene yeager August 1, 2016

Since the mid-nineties, health care professionals have used Body Mass Index (BMI)—a measure of how much mass someone has relative to their height—to identify whether a patient is at a healthy weight. A BMI between 18.5 and 24.99 is considered normal; 25 to 29.9 is overweight; and 30 and above is obese. The BMI is so revered as a standard that the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has proposed people with higher BMIs should also have to shell out more for insurance premiums, since being overweight or obese can increase your risk for diabetes and heart disease, and is considered unhealthy.

That’s a move researchers from UCLA have condemned as not just unfair, but downright incorrect, in a paper published earlier this year in the International Journal of Obesity. 

In the study, the researchers pulled data from 40,420 people in the most recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and analyzed the link between BMI and key health markers including blood pressure, glucose, insulin resistance, and cholesterol and triglyceride levels. The BMI/health connection didn’t pan out—by a long shot. Researchers found that nearly half of overweight men and women and 29 percent of obese people were otherwise totally healthy. On the flip side, more than 30 percent of those with normal BMIs were actually unhealthy according to those markers. 

“There are tens of millions of people who are overweight and obese and are perfectly healthy," says study author A. Janet Tomiyama, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at UCLA. “Right now, we have this laser focus on weight and a flawed measure like BMI, when we should be talking about health.”

That’s really important for active people like cyclists, for whom the BMI problem is two-fold. Not only are some of us likely caught in that high BMI bracket though otherwise healthy, but also BMI—which is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of the person's height in meters—was really never meant to be applied to an active and certainly not athletic population. (Here's how you can reach your ideal cycling weight, BMI be damned.)

We active folk tend to have a higher proportion of muscle tissue, which by nature is denser than fat tissue. That means we sometimes see big numbers on the scale even if we have relatively low body fat. BMI also says nothing about how your fat is distributed. Two people may have identical BMI measurements (“healthy” or otherwise), but where one might store most of their fat as deep abdominal, visceral fat—which is known to be a high health risk—the other might store it as relatively innocuous subcutaneous fat (the kind you pinch under your skin).

If you’re concerned about your BMI or your health-care provider raises a red flag over yours, Tomiyama, who directs UCLA's Dieting, Stress, and Health Lab, suggests gathering more data for a fuller picture of your weight, health, and fitness. A body composition test performed with a DEXA scan, skinfold caliper test, or bio-impedance scan (like a Tanita scale) can give you a better idea of your actual body composition, so you know how much of you is lean, muscle tissue relative to fat. Also, see your doc and round up your general health metrics:

“In our study we used a very stringent and comprehensive definition of health that included blood pressure, triglycerides, 'good' and 'bad' cholesterol, blood sugar, and inflammation,” says Tomiyama, noting that these are common tests that any healthcare provider can do and are far better indications of how healthy you are than BMI alone.

Working Out in the Heat can be Hazardous!

6 Things Medical Professionals Wish You Knew About Working Out in the Heat

Take note of these six health tips the next time you exercise outdoors on a boiling-hot day

By Danielle Zickl July 28, 2016

Summer is the perfect season for exercise buffs: The days are longer, the weather is consistently better, and cooling down requires porch-sitting with recovery beer.

But as temperatures rise into the triple digits, Exertional Heat Illness (EHI)—an umbrella term for heatstroke, heat exhaustion, heat syncope, and heat cramps—can interfere with your training and your health if you don’t take the right precautions.     

We spoke with heat-related illness specialists Dr. Douglas Casa, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut; and Dr. Michael F. Bergeron, the heat, hydration, and research advisor to Major League Soccer, for some safety tips on staying active in the heat.

 

Do Your Research

Knowing the symptoms of EHI and paying attention to your body are extremely important if you want to exercise safely in the heat. It’s easy to brush off a headache during a pickup basketball game, or attribute weakness and fatigue during a run to something like not getting enough sleep the night before, but your situation may be more serious than that. 

Headache, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, and lightheadedness are all telltale signs of heat exhaustion according to Casa, whos is also the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute, an exertional heat stroke prevention institute. Becoming disoriented or blacking out are both signs of heatstroke, which is a much more serious—even fatal—condition that requires immediate medical attention.

If you find yourself possibly suffering from heat exhaustion, Bergeron advises stopping what you’re doing and moving to a shaded or air-conditioned area immediately. Remove any excess clothing, lay flat on your back with your legs elevated, re-hydrate, and wait at least a day before working out again.

Work Out With a Buddy

Work Out With a Buddy

Having a motivator, a competitor, or just someone to talk to always makes a workout more fun. But working out with others is good for safety reasons as well, especially when exercising in the heat. 

Bergeron, who doubles as president and CEO of Youth Sports of the Americas—a group that promotes health and safe exercise for children—suggests always making sure someone is there in case anything goes wrong. Your workout buddy can also be the voice of reason those times when you want to keep going, but doing so maybe wouldn’t be the best idea. 

Drink Tons of Water

Drink Tons of Water

Staying hydrated is key to staying healthy, especially when you’re working out on a scorching day. Drinking water improves your ability to sweat, a process that cools you down; and it replenishes liquids lost to sweat.

The three key factors that determine how much fluid you need, says Casa, are the intensity of your workout, environmental conditions, and your weight. For example, if an offensive lineman loses 3 liters of water in the same time a cyclist might only lose 2 liters, that doesn’t mean the football player is more dehydrated.

Bergeron generally recommends drinking about 16 to 20 ounces of fluid per pound of body weight lost during exercise. It’s important to spread this out throughout the day and not consume it all at once if your body’s water deficit is large. It’s just as important not to wait to drink until you’re thirsty, as that’s a sign you’re already slightly dehydrated.

Work Out at the Right Time

Work Out at the Right Time

Working out early in the morning or late in the evening is best during the summer since it won’t be as hot out, and daylight is more widely available. This time frame can fit perfectly with most people’s work schedules: If you don’t feel like going for a bike ride at 6 a.m. before work (we understand completely), you can do it in the evening when you come home. (And for those on the night shift, you can finally work out outdoors when you wake up!)

But sometimes, afternoon workouts are inevitable. If your field hockey games are every week at 2 p.m., Casa says you need to be training in that type of heat all the time so you’re used to it. With that said, work your way up to it—don’t just start doing intense workouts in the sweltering heat from the start. It’s okay to take breaks and go slow. 

Wear the Right Clothing

Wear the Right Clothing

It’s important to fill your workout wardrobe with clothes that keep you cool and dry on days where it may feel like you’ve taken up permanent residence on the sun. Bergeron advises wearing items that are lightweight, breathable, and that protect your skin from UV radiation. Dry-fit clothing, which helps wick moisture and prevents the buildup of excess body heat, is also a great option. 

Eat the Right Food

Eat the Right Food

Fueling your body with foods that won’t dehydrate you is crucial when doing any type of activity on a hot day. Bergeron recommends avoiding foods that are high in fat and protein before exercising since they require time and energy to digest. As you exercise and your body heats up, blood flow to the GI tract decreases, which makes digestion more difficult and may cause nausea.

Instead, aim for hydrating foods that have high water content. Apples, melons, cucumbers, berries, grapefruit, avocado, and lettuce, among others, will all cool your body and keep you hydrated. But don’t worry: You can always have that big bowl of pasta you can’t stop thinking about during recovery.