If there is a question that we get asked often, this would be right up there. As much as we can all say that exercise is a virtuous or healthy practice, the most significant reason why people don’t is because of pain and discomfort. To add confusion and conflict to the matter, there persists a certain attitude that ranges from the sentiment of ‘toughen up’, to the cliché of ‘no pain, no gain’. Whilst it certainly is true that we can expect some discomfort with exercise – fatigue, in some degree, is a necessary part of effective exercise – the complexity of the experience of pain means that this sentiment is not particularly healthy and certainly not always true. To really understand why, there’s two things that warrant explaining: what pain actually is, and what is required to make exercise worth it.