A Durability Guide for Athletes: Knowing When Pain Means You Should Stop

Picture this:

You are halfway through a session, your heart is pounding, your legs are burning, and your breathing is heavy. So far, so good: that is the normal price you pay when you are asking a bit more from your body. Then, suddenly, you feel another kind of pain. It is no longer just fatigue: it is a sharp twinge, a discomfort that was not there yesterday, a sensation that makes you think, “If I keep going like this, I’m about to mess something up.”

You do not need help finding pain in training; that shows up on its own, sooner or later. What you really need is to understand which pain deserves your attention and which pain is simply part of the game.

In the previous piece, we talked about the main red flags in training, those signals that tell you you are pushing past a sensible limit. In this article, we focus on the trickiest one of all: pain. When it is a normal response to effort that you can move through without fear, and your body is giving a clear signal: “Stop now, or you will pay for it later.”

When Pain Becomes the Hardest Red Flag

Every serious athlete learns early that you can’t avoid discomfort. Hard sessions burn. Heavy lifts bite. Races hurt. If you try to avoid all of that, you won’t get very far. But “pain = good, just push through” is just as unhelpful. It is how a small, manageable issue can become a season‑ending injury.

Pain is not a personality test; it is the language your body uses to communicate. Treat it as information. Some signals are just the normal noise of hard work, some are asking you to adjust, and some are telling you to stop. The more fluent you become in that language, the easier it is to make smart decisions in the moment.

Here’s a simple framework—and an honest conversation with yourself—to help you read that pain data instead of ignoring it or fearing it.

What “Good” Training Pain Usually Looks Like

Let’s start with the kind of pain that belongs in training.

This is the discomfort that shows up when you ask your body to do something hard, and then fades the way it’s supposed to:

• The burning in your legs during the last 30 seconds of an interval that calms down once you back off.

• That deep breathing, heavy‑leg feeling in the final reps of a strength set that disappears after a short rest.

• DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness): a dull, diffuse muscle ache that shows up 12–48 hours after a new or harder session, often on both sides, and gradually improves as you move and over 2–3 days.

A few patterns for “good” training pain:

• It’s predictable – you can usually tie it to a specific hard session or new stimulus.

• It’s balanced – both quads, both calves, both glutes, not one tiny point screaming at you.

• It’s short‑lived – it settles as you warm up or fades over a few days.

• It doesn’t change how you move – you’re a bit stiff, but not limping, protecting, or compensating.

That’s the pain of adaptation. You don’t need to run away from it. Often, you just need to manage it with smart load, good sleep, and basic recovery.

What Injury Pain Usually Looks Like

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin: pain that deserves your attention because it’s closer to injury than productive stress.

Some common patterns:

• Sharp, pinpoint, or “electric” pain in a very specific spot (one tendon, one part of the bone, one area of a joint).

• Pain that starts suddenly during a session, especially with a pop, stab, or “giving way” feeling.

• Pain that gets worse as you go, not better – warming up doesn’t settle it; the longer or harder you go, the more it ramps up.

• Pain that changes your movement – you’re limping, shortening your stride, shifting weight off one leg or one arm, avoiding certain movements altogether.

• Pain that lingers beyond the usual DOMS pattern – it’s there in daily life, lasts more than a week, or returns every time you do a specific thing.

• Swelling, warmth, or visible irritation around a joint or tendon.

One of the biggest clues: if your brain is actively negotiating with you mid‑session (“Maybe if I land a bit differently… maybe if I don’t push off that leg…”), that’s not normal training discomfort. That’s your system trying to protect something.

You don’t earn extra toughness points for ignoring these signs. You just burn future training days.

A Simple Green / Amber / Red Code for Pain

To make this practical, here’s a color code I use with athletes: green, amber, and red.

Using a traffic‑light model to decide whether to keep going, adjust, or stop a session.

Green: Discomfort that’s safe to train through (with sense)

Green‑light sensations:

• Dull, symmetrical muscle soreness after training (DOMS).

• General heaviness from a big block that improves with a proper warm‑up.

• A bit of local stiffness that eases as you move and doesn’t worsen during the session.

If it’s green:

• You can usually train as planned or with minor adjustments (slightly less volume, greater focus on technique).

• Keep an eye on it, but you don’t need to panic or stop everything.

  
  

Amber: Something’s off, time to modify

Amber‑light sensations:

• New, one‑sided pain in a specific area (one Achilles, one knee, one side of the low back).

• Pain that is manageable but clearly getting a bit worse with each similar session.

• Pain that doesn’t fully settle between sessions, even after easier days.

• You notice you’re subtly protecting it (changing how you land, rotate, push, or pull).

If it’s amber:

• Reduce the load on that area: drop volume or intensity by 20–40% for a week or so.

• Change the stress: softer surfaces, different shoe choice, different squat variation, less plyometric impact.

• Add targeted work: strength, control, or isometrics for that region instead of just stretching it.

• Watch how it responds over 7–10 days.

Amber is where many athletes either heal or break, depending on the choices they make.

Red: Hard stop, protect the future

Red‑light sensations:

• Sudden, sharp, or “tearing” pain that makes you stop or catch your breath.

• A pop, crack, or feeling of instability.

• Pain that forces you to limp or significantly change how you move.

• Pain that clearly escalates if you try to “run it off” or push through.

• Ongoing pain that hasn’t improved over 7–10 days despite properly backing off.

If it’s red:

• End the session. Don’t keep “testing it” every 5 minutes.

• Avoid loading that area aggressively until you’ve had it assessed.

• Get in front of a qualified professional (physio, sports doc) sooner rather than later.

• Don’t self‑diagnose via a Google rabbit hole.

Stopping once for a red‑flag episode might cost you a week. Ignoring it can cost you a season.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself When Something Hurts

When you feel pain mid‑session, run through this quick internal checklist:

2 of the 5 questions for a quick self-check and assessment to use on the go.

1. Did this start suddenly, or has it been building over time? Sudden + sharp leans more injury; gradual + dull can be overload or DOMS.

2. Does it improve as I warm up, or worsen as I go? Better with a warm‑up, then stable = more likely to be green.

   Worse as you go = amber/red.

3. Is it changing how I move? If you’re limping, guarding, or avoiding specific moves, that’s not just “normal pain.”

4. Does it calm down between sessions, or is it always there now? DOMS and normal soreness, picks and dips. Constant, nagging pain is a different story.

5. If I had to rate it on a scale of 1–10, where is it right now? For most athletes, anything in the 1–3 range is usually background noise or just something to monitor, depending on how you answered the earlier questions. Around 4/10 is where we draw the line: you either change the session, scale it back, or stop and have it checked, rather than using it as a chance to prove how tough you are.

You don’t need perfect answers to all five questions. But if most of them lean toward ‘worse,’ ‘changing how I move,’ or ‘always there,’ that is your cue to stop chasing toughness and start protecting your availability for the next weeks and months of training.

How Strength, Conditioning, and Fueling Shift the Line

Here’s where the durability piece comes in.

A stronger, better‑conditioned chassis doesn’t remove pain from sport—but it does change the type of pain you mostly deal with:

• More of the “good” kind: exertion, DOMS, manageable stiffness that resolves.

• Less of the “bad” kind: cranky tendons, bone stress, joint irritation every time the load goes up.

Building better landings, not just higher jumps: using strength and control work to reduce stress on joints and keep you ready to train.

Consistent strength and conditioning:

• Improves tissue capacity (your tendons, muscles, and bones can tolerate more before they complain).

• Makes your movement more efficient, so you’re not constantly overloading the same weak link.

• Gives you more options: you can swap or modify exercises without feeling like you’re starting from zero.

  
  

Fueling matters, too. Training hard on low energy availability, or drifting into a relative‑energy‑deficit pattern, makes injury‑type pain more likely, especially in bones and tendons. You don’t need to be perfect, but you do need enough energy and nutrients to support the work you’re asking your system to do.

In simple terms: a well‑fed, well‑trained chassis lets you push into the pain cave more safely. A tired, under‑fueled, under‑strength chassis will send you injury‑style pain signals much sooner.

Tough vs Smart: Knowing When to Stop

Being tough is not about bulldozing through every ache. It is about knowing when to lean into the pain cave on purpose—key sessions, races, tests—and when to recognize, “This pain is different; stopping is the smartest move I can make today.”

Checking movement, not just mileage: using a form screen to spot stress points early, adjust the plan, and keep you training instead of sitting on the sidelines.

Athletes who last the longest treat pain as information, not a verdict on their character. Stopping because of pain does not mean stopping everything; it means hitting pause on the thing that is aggravating it and using that space for purposeful rest, strength and conditioning, and targeted work that helps tissue heal and shores up the weak links that contributed to the problem in the first place.

If you love your sport, your goal is not to feel nothing; it is to understand your pain code well enough that you keep stacking healthy seasons instead of bouncing between flare‑ups. That way, you are not trading years of doing what you love for one extra “tough” session your body was clearly asking you to step away from—and if you are not sure how to assess, adjust, or rebuild, this is exactly where working with a professional coach or clinician who understands both performance and rehab can help you keep training and come back stronger than before.